38 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICThe art she
championed,
and the art
she made,
valued the
eternal post-
ponement
of emotional
involvement.Moser’s analysis of Sontag’s life as an unwinnable BOOKS
battle between her public self and her private self
traffics in the crudest of oppositions: appearance
versus character, mind versus body, intellectual-
ism versus eroticism, persona versus private self.
Erecting these dichotomies is the biography’s
narrative mode, its method of building intrigue
and suspense. Can you believe, Moser wonders,
that a beautiful and intelligent woman could be
insecure about her professional success? Can
you believe that inhuman productivity, fueled by
chronic insomnia, a violent disdain for napping,
and an addiction to speed, might be an attempt to
compensate for social isolation? Can you believe
that having sex and falling in love with many peo-
ple, of many persuasions, might trouble the divide
between mind and body? “Susan—human—drove
people away,” Moser concludes. “But the symbolic
Sontag was tremendously attractive.”
Moser’s interpretations often fall back on
armchair psychology, pathologizing Sontag’s re-
lationships by making everything symptomatic of
something else. Too many roads lead back to her
mother, who emerges as Sontag and Moser’s shared
villain. “Many of the apparently rebarbative aspects
of Sontag’s personality are clarified in light of the
alcoholic family system,” Moser writes, describing
how Mildred’s addiction impressed itself on Sontag.
She “would turn lovers into parents,” he suggests,
as if this reading were original. (Sontag admits as
much in her diaries.) He diagnoses her as having a
Cluster B personality disorder, whose symptoms in-
clude “fears of abandonment and feelings of incon-
solable loneliness, which trigger frantic neediness.”
The more clinically Moser tries to pin down Sontag’s
inner life, the more it wriggles away from him.
“She warned against the mystifications of photo-
graphs and portraits: including those of biog-
raphers,” Moser writes in the closing sentence of
Sontag: Her Life and Work. It’s hard to know how to
read the line. Is Moser asking for our understand-
ing, given the inherent limitations of biography as
a genre? All biographies are, to an extent, mystifica-
tions. But some methods of reading and writing can
resurrect the dead not as a series of tedi ous opposi-
tions, but as flesh-and-blood individuals animated
by their commitments to their ideas. What this
would require is more sensitive probing of human
contradictions than Moser has yet mastered.T
HE BEST ANSWER to the question I
opened with—why do we want and need
a Susan Sontag?—comes from the literary
critic Deborah Nelson’s fantastic 2017 book, Tough
Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag,
We i l. In Nelson’s view, Sontag’s thoughts on art
and modernity are neither original nor system-
atic. What is enchanting about her writing is her
style: an associative and aphoristic approach totalking about, or around, intense emotions with-
out indulging in them. “An aphorism is not an ar-
gument; it is too well-bred for that,” Sontag wrote
in her diary—a glimpse of how her style served as
an exercise in emotional self-regulation, in model-
ing aesthetic decorum. Her essays aspired to teach
her readers how to “feel more sensually” as “the
antidote to feeling too much or too little emotion,”
Nelson writes, offering a more nuanced reading
than Moser does of Sontag’s desire “to see more,
to hear more, to feel more.”
“She was Athena, not Aphrodite,” Moser sug-
gests, a comparison that is instructive for under-
standing Sontag’s place in a long lineage of female
archetypes that make our attraction to a figure like
her legible. In Greek mythology, Athena was the
favorite daughter of Zeus, the child born from his
forehead. She caused her tyrannical father such
pain that he had his head cleaved open. Out she
sprang, armor-plated and golden, im perishable,
eager to counsel mortal men against foolish-
ness and vulgarity, to teach them the virtues of
self- control and courage. Sontag, too, distrusted
immodera tion, preferring instead “coolness,”
“distance,” “disinterestedness and impartiality”
when such responses were most necessary—when
the subject matter was hardest to bear. The art she
championed, and the art she made, valued the
eternal postponement of emotional involvement,
the containment of soft Aphrodite’s passions in a
brisk, impersonal prose.
Where Moser perceives a striking, irrecon-
cilable gap between Sontag’s private and public
selves, Nelson finds a dialectical unity. Sontag’s
embrace of a cool aesthetic intelligence is all the
fiercer for her personal experiences of desire and
distress; her style is a critical rejection of the “Ro-
mantic drama of individuality, emotional intensity,
and powerlessness” that she was living. Nelson
refers to this as “disciplined self-transcendence,”
and it is, I suspect, the source of both Sontag’s pro-
ductivity and her appeal—an appeal that far out-
strips her physical appearance. There is something
mesmerizing about the lifelong performance of
discipline, something beautiful about the artifice
required to exercise control over one’s turbulent or
painful inner life. What we are attracted to in Son-
tag is the idea of a woman whose writing can induct
readers into a style of feeling, of attachment, of
vulnerability, while also appearing to refuse those
feelings, those attachments, that vulnerability, for
herself—a woman who wears her armor exactly
where it was meant to be worn, on her sleeve.Merve Emre is an associate professor of English
at the University of Oxford. She is the author,
most recently, of The Personality Brokers: The
Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth
of Personality Testing.SONTAG:
HER LIFE AND WORK
BENJAMIN MOSER
Ecco