58 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER23, 2019
“Grande soy latte for This Is a Robbery.”• •
full of them, of a canny reinvention.”
Moser’s story of the good-looking
young ex-faculty wife/Ph.D. candidate
who comes to New York to seek her
fortune among the Partisan Review in-
tellectuals has something of the atmo-
sphere of nineteenth-century narratives
about the rise of famous Parisian cour-
tesans. Sontag did not want to be an
academic; she wanted only to write. But
there isn’t much of a living in the kind
of things that she wrote. Her first novel,
“The Benefactor” (1963), is a very ad-
vanced kind of experiment in unread-
ability. “Against Interpretation and Other
Essays,” the book of criticism that fol-
lowed (“Notes on Camp” appeared in
it), three years later, brought her acclaim
but hardly made her rich. Sontag was
accused of humorlessness, but in fact
she was guilty only of high-mindedness.
Her early essays are addressed to the
ten or twenty people in the English-
speaking world who would not blanch
at sentences like these, from her essay
on the philosopher E. M. Cioran:
One recognizes, in this Roumanian-born
writer who studied philosophy at the University
of Bucharest and who has lived in Paris since
1937 and writes in French, the convulsive man-
ner characteristic of German neo-philosophi-
cal thinking, whose motto is: aphorism or eter-
nity. (Examples: the philosophical aphorisms of
Lichtenberg and Novalis; Nietzsche of course;
passages in Rilke’s Duino Elegies; and Kafka’s
Reflections on Love, Sin, Hope, Death, the Way.)
The “of course” says it all. Sontag would
later write in a more accessible, though
never plain-speaking, manner. “Illness
as Metaphor” (1978), her polemic against
the pernicious mythologies that blame
people for their illnesses, with tubercu-
losis and cancer as prime exemplars, was
a popular success as well as a significant
influence on how we think about the
world. Her novel “The Volcano Lover”
(1992), a less universally appreciated
work, became a momentary best-seller.
But in the sixties Sontag struggled to
survive as a writer who didn’t teach. A
protector was needed, and he appeared
on cue. He was Roger Straus, the head
of Farrar, Straus, who published both
“The Benefactor” and “Against Inter-
pretation” and, Moser writes,... made Susan’s career possible. He published
every one of her books. He kept her alive, pro-
fessionally, financially, and sometimes physi-
cally. She was fully aware that she would not
have had the life she had if he had not taken
her under his protection when he did. In the
literary world, their relationship was a source
of fascination: of envy for writers who longed
for a protector as powerful and loyal; of gos-
sip for everyone who speculated about what
the relationship entailed.“They had sex on several occasions, in
hotels. She had no problems telling me
that,” Greg Chandler, an assistant of
Sontag’s, had no problems telling Moser.
A final protector was the photogra-pher Annie Leibovitz, who became
Sontag’s lover in 1989 and, during the
fifteen years of their on-again, off-again
relationship, gave her “at least” eight
million dollars, according to Moser, who
cites Leibovitz’s accountant, Rick Kan-
tor. Katie Roiphe, in a remarkable essay
on Sontag’s agonizing final year, in her
book “The Violet Hour: Great Writ-
ers at the End,” pauses to think about
the “strange, inconsequential lies” that
Sontag told all her life. Among them
was the lie she told “about the price of
her apartment on Riverside Drive, be-
cause she wanted to seem like she was
an intellectual who drifted into a lovely
apartment and did not spend a lot of
money on real estate, like a more bour-
geois, ordinary person.” But by the time
of Annie Leibovitz’s protectorship her
self-image had changed. She was happy
to trade in her jeans for silk trousers
and her loft apartment for a penthouse.
The courtesan analogy may be less
ludicrous when applied to the Annie
Leibovitz period than to the Roger
Straus one. Nunez, in her memoir, set
in the Straus period, wrote of the Riv-
erside Drive apartment:Its main feature was the growing number
of books, but they were mostly paperbacks,
and the shelves were cheap pine board. To
go with the lack of furniture, there was a lack
of decorative objects, there were no curtains
or rugs, and the kitchen had only the basics.
About six square feet of kitchen space were
taken up by an old freezer that hadn’t worked
in years. A pair of pliers sat on top of the TV
set—for changing channels since the knob
for that purpose had broken off. People vis-
iting for the first time were clearly surprised
to find the celebrated middle-aged writer liv-
ing like a grad student.Nunez, who was twenty-three-year-old
David Rieff ’s twenty-five-year-old girl-
friend and lived in the apartment with
him and Sontag for more than a year,
stresses that “the time I’m talking about
was before—before the grand Chelsea
penthouse, the enormous library, the
rare editions, the art collection, the de-
signer clothes, the country house, the
personal assistant, the housekeeper, the
personal chef.”
Nunez’s short book (it’s a hundred
and forty pages) raises the ethical ques-
tion that Nunez herself must have wres-
tled with: Is it ever O.K. to violate the
privacy that friends, dead or alive, as-