THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019 57
“Terrible plating.”
• •
scam artist. And he drops this bomb-
shell: he claims that Rieff did not write
his great book—Sontag did. Moser in
no way substantiates his claim. He
merely believes that a pretentious creep
like Rieff could not have written it. “The
book is so excellent in so many ways, so
complete a working-out of the themes
that marked Susan Sontag’s life, that it
is hard to imagine it could be the prod-
uct of a mind that later produced such
meager fruits,” Moser writes.
The hardest piece of evidence that
Moser offers for his thesis is a letter that
Sontag wrote to her younger sister, Ju-
dith, in 1950, about her exciting new job
as Rieff ’s research assistant. One of her
duties, she tells Judith, was to read and
then write reviews of both scholarly and
popular books that Rieff had been as-
signed to review and was too busy or
too lazy to read and write about him-
self. Certainly, this doesn’t reflect well
on Rieff, but it hardly proves that Son-
tag wrote “The Mind of the Moralist.”
Moser’s interviews with contemporar-
ies who knew that Sontag was working
on the book don’t prove her authorship,
either. Nevertheless, he has so thoroughly
convinced himself of it that when he
quotes from “The Mind of the Moral-
ist” he performs the sleight of hand of
saying “she writes” or “Sontag notes.” By
Moser’s lights, every writer who has been
heavily edited can no longer claim to be
the author of his work. “Get me rewrite!”
the city-room editor barks into the phone
in nineteen-thirties comedies about the
newspaper world. In Moser’s world, re-
write becomes write. Sigrid Nunez, in
her memoir “Sempre Susan,” contrib-
utes what may be the last word on the
subject of the authorship of “The Mind
of the Moralist”: “Although her name
did not appear on the cover, she was a
full coauthor, she always said. In fact,
she sometimes went further, claiming to
have written the entire book herself,
‘every single word of it.’ I took this to
be another one of her exaggerations.”
G
eniuses are often born to parents
afflicted with no such abnormal-
ity, and Sontag belongs to this group.
Her father, Jack Rosenblatt, the son of
uneducated immigrants from Galicia,
had left school at the age of ten to work
as a delivery boy in a New York fur-trad-
ing firm. By sixteen, he had worked his
way up in the company to a position of
responsibility sufficient to send him to
China to buy hides. By the time of Su-
san’s birth, in 1933, he had his own fur
business and was regularly travelling to
Asia. Mildred, Susan’s mother, who ac-
companied Jack on these trips, was a
vain, beautiful woman who came from
a less raw Jewish immigrant family. In
1938, while in China, Jack died, of tu-
berculosis, leaving Mildred with five-
year-old Susan and two-year-old Ju-
dith to raise alone. By all reports, she
was a terrible mother, a narcissist and
a drinker.
Moser’s account is largely derived
from Susan’s writings: from entries in
her journal and from an autobiograph-
ical story called “Project for a Trip to
China.” Moser also uses a book called
“Adult Children of Alcoholics,” by Janet
Geringer Woititz, published in 1983, to
explain the darkness of Sontag’s later
life. “The child of the alcoholic is plagued
by low self-esteem, always feeling, no
matter how loudly she is acclaimed, that
she is falling short,” he writes. By push-
ing the child Susan away and at the
same time leaning on her for emotional
support, Mildred sealed off the possi-
bility of any future lightheartedness. “In-
deed, many of the apparently rebarba-
tive aspects of Sontag’s personality are
clarified in light of the alcoholic family
system, as it was later understood,” Moser
writes, and he goes on:
Her enemies, for example, accused her of
taking herself too seriously, of being rigid and
humorless, of possessing a baffling inability to
relinquish control of even the most trivial mat-
ters.... Parents to their parents, forbidden
the carelessness of normal children, they [chil-
dren of alcoholics] assume an air of premature
seriousness. But often, in adulthood, the “ex-
ceptionally well behaved” mask slips and re-
veals an out-of-season child.
In his account of Sontag’s worldly suc-
cess, Moser shifts to a less baleful regis-
ter. He rightly identifies Mildred’s remar-
riage to a man named Nathan Sontag, in
1945, as a seminal event in Susan’s rise to
stardom. In an essay from 2005, Wayne
Koestenbaum wrote, “At no other writ-
er’s name can I stare entranced for hours
on end—only Susan Sontag’s. She lived
up to that fabulous appellation.” Would
Koestenbaum have stared entranced at
the name Susan Rosenblatt? Are any
bluntly Jewish appellations fabulous? Al-
though Nathan did not adopt Susan and
her sister, Susan eagerly made the change
that, as Moser writes, “transformed the
gawky syllables of Sue Rosenblatt into
the sleek trochees of Susan Sontag.” It
was, Moser goes on, one of “the first re-
corded instances, in a life that would be
