54 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
THE UNHOLY PRACTICE
A biography as unillusioned about Susan Sontag as she was about herself.BYJANET MALCOLMT
wo volumes of Susan Sontag’s dia-
ries, edited by her son, David Rieff,
have been published, and a third is forth-
coming. In the preface to the first vol-
ume, published in 2008, under the title
“Reborn,” Rieff confesses his uncertainty
about the project. He reports that at the
time of her death, in 2004, Sontag had
given no instructions about the dozens
of notebooks that she had been filling
with her private thoughts since adoles-
cence and which she kept in a closet in
her bedroom. “Left to my own devices,”
he writes, “I would have waited a long
time before publishing them, or per-
haps never published them at all.” But
because Sontag had sold her papers to
the University of California at Los An-
geles, and access to them was largely un-
restricted, “either I would organize them
and present them or someone else would,”
so “it seemed better to go forward.” How-
ever, he writes, “my misgivings remain.
To say that these diaries are self-revela-
tory is a drastic understatement.”
In them, Sontag beats up on herself
for just about everything it is possible
to beat up on oneself for short of mur-
der. She lies, she cheats, she betrays
confidences, she pathetically seeks the
approval of others, she fears others, she
talks too much, she smiles too much,
she is unlovable, she doesn’t bathe often
enough. In February, 1960, she lists “all
the things that I despise in myself ...
being a moral coward, being a liar, being
indiscreet about myself + others, being
a phony, being passive.” In August, 1966,
she writes of “a chronic nausea—after
I’m with people. The awareness (after-
awareness) of how programmed I am,
how insincere, how frightened.” In Feb-
ruary, 1960, she writes, “How many times
have I told people that Pearl Kazin was
a major girlfriend of Dylan Thomas?
That Norman Mailer has orgies? That
Matthiessen was queer. All public know-
ledge, to be sure, but who the hell am
I to go advertising other people’s sex-
ual habits? How many times have I
reviled myself for that, which is only a
little less offensive than my habit of
name-dropping (how many times did
I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year,
while I was on Commentary?).”
The world received the diaries calmly
enough; there is not a big readership for
published diaries. It will be interesting
to see whether Benjamin Moser’s au-
thorized biography, “Sontag: Her Life
and Work” (Ecco), which draws heav-
ily on the diaries, makes more of a stir.
Moser takes Sontag at her word and
is as unillusioned about her as she is
about herself. The solid literary achieve-
ment and spectacular worldly success
that we associate with Sontag was, in
Moser’s telling, always shadowed by ab-
ject fear and insecurity, increasingly ac-
companied by the unattractive behavior
that fear and insecurity engender. The
dauntingly erudite, strikingly handsome
woman who became a star of the New
York intelligentsia when barely thirty,
after publishing the essay “Notes on
Camp,” and who went on to produce
book after book of advanced criticism
and fiction, is brought low in this biog-
raphy. She emerges from it as a person
more to be pitied than envied.
If the journals authenticate Moser’s
dire portrait, his interviews with friends,
lovers, family members, and employees
deepen its livid hue. Why do peoplespeak to biographers about their late fa-
mous friends? In most cases, the motive
is benign: the informant wants to be
helpful, wants to share what he knows
of the subject, believing that the partic-
ulars he and only he is privy to will con-
tribute to the fullness of the portrait. A
bit of self-importance may be involved:
the interviewee is flattered to have been
asked to the party. Of course, he intends
to be discreet, to keep some things to
himself. The best intentions, however,
can be broken on the wheel of skillful
(or even inept) interviewing. Discretion
so quickly turns into indiscretion under
the exciting spell of undivided attention.
Thus the film scholar Don Eric Levine,
a close friend of Sontag’s, is Moser’s
source for writing that “when Jasper
[ Johns] dumped her, he did so in a way
that would have devastated almost any-
one. He invited her to a New Year’s Eve
party and then left, without a word, with
another woman.” Moser adds, “The in-
cident goes unmentioned in her jour-
nals.” In another unmentioned incident
(until Moser mentions it), Levine is sur-
prised when Sontag tells him that she
is going to pick up her son from a school-
mate’s house: “This is not Susan. Why
is she going to pick up her son? I didn’t
say anything. When she came back she
put David to bed and then she said,
‘Guess what? I knocked on the door. It
was the Dakota ’ ... She knocked on the
door, and who opened the door? ... Of
course she knew who was opening the
door. Lauren Bacall.”
“I loved Susan,” Leon Wieseltier said.
“But I didn’t like her.” He was, Moser
writes, speaking for many others. Roger
Deutsch, another friend, reported, “If