36 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTICBOOKSMisunderstanding
Susan Sontag
Her beauty and celebrity eclipse the real source of
her allure—her commitment to cool control.BY MERVE EMRE“
T
O EXPERIENCE A THING as beautiful means: to experi-
ence it necessarily wrongly,” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in
The Will to Power. It is a line that Susan Sontag quotes toward
the end of her 1977 essay collection, On Photography, about
how photographs aestheticize misery. It is a line that Sontag’s
authorized biographer, Benjamin Moser, quotes to describe
Sontag’s susceptibility to beautiful, but punishing, lovers. And it is a line that
I am quoting to summarize how Moser’s monumental and stylish biography,
Sontag: Her Life and Work, fails its subject—a woman whose beauty, and the sex
appeal and celebrity that went along with it, Moser insists upon to the point of
occluding what makes her so deeply interesting.
The fascination of Sontag lies in her endurance as a cultural icon, the model
of how a woman should think and write in public, even though her thinking
and writing weren’t very rigorous. What is intriguing about Sontag is less
who she was than how we understand our desire for her, or someone like her,
to occupy a rare position in American literary culture: that of a dark-haired,
dark-eyed, apparently in vulnerable woman capable of transforming intellec-
tual seriousness into an erotic spectacle. What need does such a presence and
performance satisfy?
Sontag herself was wary of the impulse to anoint. In her 1975 essay “A
Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?” she argues that conceiving of
a woman’s beauty as antithetical to her other virtues makes beauty morally sus-
pect: “We not only split off—with the greatest facility—the ‘inside’ (character,
intellect) from the ‘outside’ (looks); but we are actually surprised when some-
one who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.” The power of beauty
is self-negating, Sontag warns. It is a “power ... always conceived in relation to
men; it is not the power to do but the power to attract.” We need “some critical
distance” from beauty if we are to avoid the “crude trap” of treating a woman’s
self-presentation as separable from, and opposed to, her interior self.
One imagines that Sontag would have been dismayed to see her biogra-
pher adopting exactly these dichotomies to frame her life and work. “Susan
Sontag was America’s last great literary star,” Moser proclaims in his introduc-
tion. “She was incongruous: a beautiful young woman who was intimidatingly
learned.” In public she was “The Dark Lady of American Letters.” (The title
was, in fact, originally given by Norman Podhoretz to Mary McCarthy, whoupon meeting Sontag was said to have remarked,
“Oh, you’re the imitation me.”) In private she was
“Miss Librarian,” Sontag’s name for her studious
self. “The camera- ready version of Susan Sontag
would always remain at odds with Miss Librarian,”
Moser continues. “Never, perhaps, had a great
beauty worked less hard at being beautiful. She of-
ten expressed her astonish ment at encountering
the glamorous woman in the photographs.”
Sontag: Her Life and Work assumes this same
attitude of astonish ment as Moser sets out to
measure the distance between “the individual”
who was Sontag— brilliant, studious, insensitive,
dishonest, ashamed of her sexuality, a glutton
for emotional pain—and “the representation of
the individual” that became Sontag, the “Sibyl of
Manhattan.” For Sontag, Moser argues, the gap be-
tween “a thing and its symbol,” between metaphor
and reality, was “a matter of life and death.”H
E R L I F E B E G A N ordinarily enough,
on the West Side of Manhattan in the
winter of 1933. She was born Susan Lee
Rosenblatt, daughter of Mildred, a vain and cruel
alcoholic, and Jack, a tubercular fur salesman who
died when Sue was 5. She was a precocious and
lonely child. Her friends were her books: Madame
Curie, Les Misérables, The Sorrows of Young Werther,
Martin Eden. Her mother, who was intimidated by
Sue’s intelligence, dragged her and her sister, Judith,
from New York to Miami Beach to Tucson—where
Mildred met and married an Army pilot named Nat
Sontag—and finally to Los Angeles in 1946. “Sue, if
you read so much you’ll never find a husband,” her
stepfather warned her. But Sue didn’t listen.
At 16, Sontag left home for UC Berkeley. There
she discovered Djuna Barnes’s tale of lesbian de-
sire and despair, Nightwood, and, while browsing
at a bookstore, met the woman who would be her
on-again, off-again lover for the next decade, Har-
riet Sohmers. (“Have you read Nightwood?” was
Sohmers’s excellent pickup line.) Sontag was un-
nerved by her attraction to women, deter mined to
“force” herself “to have sex with men,” she wrote in
her diary. When she transferred to the University
of Chicago at the end of the academic year, “her
kind of beauty found fervent admirers,” Moser
writes. She began working as a research assistant
for a young economics professor named Philip
Rieff, whom she married after one week of diligent
note-taking. (“Don’t laugh! he’s not handsome,” she
told her mother.) While pregnant with their son, Da-
vid, she began co-writing Rieff ’s first book, Freud:
The Mind of the Moralist. Rieff (who did not credit
her) got a job at Brandeis University, and in the fall
of 1952, they moved east. Two years later, she began
graduate school in English at Harvard.
Sontag grew to hate marriage and Harvard,
so she left them both, as well as her son, to study