56 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
somebody like Jackie Onassis put in
$2,000”—for a fund to help Sontag when
she was ill and had no insurance—“Susan
would say, ‘That woman is so rich. Jackie
Onassis. Who does she think she is?’”
If friends cannot control their ambiv-
alence, what about the enemies who can-
not wait to take their revenge? “Susan
was very interested in being morally pure,
but at the same time she was one of the
most immoral people I ever knew. Patho-
logically so. Treacherous,” Eva Kollisch,
a pissed-off girlfriend from the sixties,
tells Moser, as if she had been expecting
his call for half a century. Moser accepts
her grievances at face value and weaves
them into his unsparing narrative.
B
iographers often get fed up with their
subjects, with whom they have be-
come grotesquely overfamiliar. We know
no one in life the way biographers know
their subjects. It is an unholy practice,
the telling of a life story that isn’t one’s
own on the basis of oppressively mas-
sive quantities of random, not necessar-
ily reliable information. The demands
this makes on the practitioner’s pow-
ers of discrimination, as well as on his
capacity for sympathy, may be impossi-
ble to fulfill. However, Moser’s exasper-
ation with Sontag is fuelled by some-
thing that lies outside the problematic
of biographical writing. Midway through
the biography, he drops the mask of neu-
tral observer and reveals himself to be—
you could almost say comes out as—
an intellectual adversary of his subject.
Coming out is at issue,
in fact. The occasion is
Sontag’s thrillingly good
essay “Fascinating Fas-
cism,” published in The
New York Review of Books
in 1975 and reprinted in the
book “Under the Sign of
Saturn,” in which she justly
destroyed Leni Riefen-
stahl’s newly restored rep-
utation, showing her to be
a Nazi sympathizer in every bone. After
giving the essay its due, Moser suddenly
swerves to the side of the poet Adrienne
Rich, who wrote a letter to the Review
protesting Sontag’s en-passant attribu-
tion of Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation to
feminists who “would feel a pang at hav-
ing to sacrifice the one woman who made
films that everybody acknowledges to
be firstrate.” Moser holds up Rich as “an
intellectual of the first rank” who had
“written essays in no way inferior to
Sontag’s” and as an exemplar of what
Sontag might have been if she had had
the guts. At a time when homosexual-
ity was still being criminalized, Rich had
acknowledged her lesbianism, while Son-
tag was silent about hers. Rich had been
punished for her bravery (“by coming
out publicly, [she] bought herself a ticket
to Siberia—or at least away from the
patriarchal world of New York culture”),
while Sontag had been rewarded for her
cowardice. Later in the book, Moser can
barely contain his rage at Sontag for not
coming out during the AIDS crisis. “There
was much she could have done, and gay
activists implored her to do the most
basic, most courageous, most principled
thing of all,” he writes. “They asked her
to say ‘I,’ to say ‘my body’: to come out
of the closet.” Moser cannot forgive her
for her refusal to do so.
S
ontag’s love life was unusual. At
fifteen, she wrote in her journal of
the “lesbian tendencies” she was finding
in herself. The following year, she began
sleeping with women and delighting in
it. Simultaneously, she wrote of her dis-
gust at the thought of sex with men:
“Nothing but humiliation and degrada-
tion at the thought of physical relations
with a man—The first time I kissed
him—a very long kiss—I thought quite
distinctly: ‘Is this all?—it’s so silly.’” Less
than two years later, as a student at the
University of Chicago, she
married—a man! He was
Philip Rieff, a twenty-nine-
year-old professor of so-
ciology, for whom she
worked as a research assis-
tant, and to whom she
stayed married for eight
years. The early years of
Sontag’s marriage to Rieff
are the least documented
of her life, and they’re a lit-
tle mysterious, leaving much to the imag-
ination. They are what you could call
her years in the wilderness, the years be-
fore her emergence as the celebrated
figure she remained for the rest of her
life. She followed Rieff to the places of
his academic appointments (among them
Boston, where Sontag did graduate work
in the Harvard philosophy department),
became pregnant and had a then per-
force illegal abortion, became pregnant
again, and gave birth to her son, David.
There was tremendous intellectual
affinity between Sontag and Rieff. “At
seventeen I met a thin, heavy-thighed,
balding man who talked and talked,
snobbishly, bookishly, and called me
‘Sweet.’ After a few days passed, I mar-
ried him,” she recalled in a journal entry
from 1973. By the time of the marriage,
in 1951, she had discovered that sex with
men wasn’t so bad. Moser cites a doc-
ument that he found among Sontag’s
unpublished papers in which she lists
thirty-six people she had slept with be-
tween the ages of fourteen and seven-
teen, and which included men as well
as women. Moser also quotes from a
manuscript he found in the archive
which he believes to be a memoir of the
marriage: “They stayed in bed most of
the first months of their marriage, mak-
ing love four or five times a day and in
between talking, talking endlessly about
art and politics and religion and mor-
als.” The couple did not have many
friends, because they “tended to criti-
cize them out of acceptability.”
In addition to her graduate work, and
caring for David, Sontag helped Rieff
with the book he was writing, which
was to become the classic “Freud: The
Mind of the Moralist.” She grew in-
creasingly dissatisfied with the marriage.
“Philip is an emotional totalitarian,” she
wrote in her journal, in March, 1957. One
day, she had had enough. She applied
for and received a fellowship at Oxford,
and left husband and child for a year.
After a few months at Oxford, she went
to Paris and sought out Harriet Sohmers,
who had been her first lover, ten years
earlier. For the next four decades, Son-
tag’s life was punctuated by a series of
intense, doomed love affairs with beau-
tiful, remarkable women, among them
the dancer Lucinda Childs and the ac-
tress and filmmaker Nicole Stéphane.
The journals document, sometimes in
excruciatingly naked detail, the torment
and heartbreak of these liaisons.
If Moser’s feelings about Sontag are
mixed—he always seems a little awed
as well as irked by her—his dislike for
Philip Rieff is undiluted. He writes of
him with utter contempt. He mocks his
fake upper-class accent and fancy be-
spoke-looking clothes. He calls him a
