Monday, January 03, 2005
(10:01 AM) | Anonymous:
Flashes of Genius: Reflections on Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
Kindred Spirits and the Special Affection for Spirits Not Exactly KindredThat Susan Sontag was one of the most brilliant figures of thinking and of letters of the last half of the twentieth century is indisputable.
That she had--or better,was--flashes of genius is probably closer to the truth than simply referring to her with the rather meaningless 'she was a genius' or 'a great genius.' That latter cliché is tiresomely used, and much too frequently, especially when it is difficult to say it without qualification but for a handful of artists and thinkers, perhaps Goethe or Debussy or Shakespeare and Leonardo and some others.
This essay is highly personal, and does not attempt to exhaustively cover Sontag's very visible career or to even touch upon nearly all of her works. I don't even think further research, as I had originally planned on doing a little of at least, is warranted for this kind of piece, which is part 'story' more than anything else. It has to do with the idea of 'the kindred spirit' and also of the respect and affection one may feel for one for whom one does not feel quite that 'kindred'-and the latter is the way I felt and still feel about Susan Sontag. So that, on the one hand, even the New York Times obituary is better for a straightforward survey than I could give, or the 2000 biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, which covers a great deal of her professional and personal personae; there were many. On the other hand, I have not read nearly all of her works, nor have I wanted to. I still don't want to read most of it, and much of what I have read I have disliked intensely; but what I have found convincing I have found immensely powerful. The weird digressions I have employed to try to convey something of what I deeply feel about Sontag and her singular profundity may or may not be successful; but they are the only ways I have known to proceed. The fact is that this was unquestionably one of the most difficult of women, a woman who was never even for a second 'easy.' That she also actually prided herself on not having a sense of humour (which seems tantamount to a cardinal sin to me) and that I could still find her so moving is probably the only case in my experience. One of her most famous books is called 'I, Etc.', and so one could say that this is my own 'I, Etc.' about Susan Sontag.
So that she is very meaningful to me, and also she has somehow never been far from my mind for about ten years. The fact that her death has for some time seemed to me quite consciously something that would come 'any day now' within the particular world intellectual climate in which we live now, however, does not make me feel its occurrence this past Tuesday, December 28, any less keenly; and I imagine that the mention of that emotion in a comment I made recently in one of Adam's posts is in part what prompted him to suggest a longer post. This one has become long, yes, but insofar as it may arrive at any hint to some essence of this impossible and enigmatic woman, I have described the peculiarly strained relationship I have had with her work and persona. In writing not quite as a fan but as a sometimes most ardent admirer anyway, it is therefore only my use of this oblique approach that could possibly offer anything not more accessible in countless other sources.
To me her brilliance was so often contradicted by an enormous arrogance of presentation that I was often grateful to her less for her own writing than for what she led me to in others' works-since her reading was probably as vast as that of anyone in the world-and yet this contradiction was probably inevitable in someone who was truly an intellectual but was one of the very few intellectuals qua intellectual who became an enormous celebrity and as well a symbol of a kind of high-toned glamour and chic. (As recently as two years ago, for example, the owner of Chateau Marmont and The Standard on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, advertised his special 'refinement of taste' (read 'social climbing') in Los Angeles Magazine by pointing out that he was not interested in any of the movie stars who frequented his establishments, but had recently been captivated by Susan Sontag. Such a publicity configuration, of course, is probably not the mark of someone who had spent a lot of time on Barthes, Brecht or Kafka, three of Sontag's heroes.)
*
I saw her numerous times in New York, but only twice (the more recent ones) when I knew who she was. In the late 1960's she lived in the penthouse at 340 Riverside Drive at 106th Street, where my first high-powered piano teacher also lived and groomed me for my studies that would take place at Juilliard and lead me to Paris. However, I already knew who she was and had wanted to see her film of the time, 'Duet for Cannibals', made in Sweden. I didn't see it and still haven't, although I would very much like to. I had heard of the famous 'Notes on Camp' essay, but hadn't read it yet. Only in 1978, when I did some further coaching with the same teacher, did she tell me that 'Susan lives in the penthouse of this building, you know'-and then it all of a sudden came back that I had indeed passed the extraordinarily handsome then-young woman with the famous mane of dark hair (which would later bear the startling white streak in it, like the mark of some biological sport) many times in the building and passing by on 106th St. She then went into a long tirade of complaints about how 'you'll get into the elevator and Susan is always smoking-even in the elevator!' or 'and then Susan and her son [David Rieff] are always walking down the street holding hands-with each other!! Don't you think that's kind of …GREEK?' (In the most frightful poetic justice, this very teacher would be accused as recently as 2003 of 'Jocasta-mothering' of her own agoraphobic son: I can personally attest from the misery I suffered at the hands of those two in 2001-2002 that this went much further in terms of the psychologically incestuous than anything Sontag and Rieff ever practiced.)
That was the period in which Sontag had just recently finished her 'Illness as Metaphor,' which chronicles her first long-and fortunately successful-bout with breast cancer.
She appeared everywhere talking about it, and I remember a chat on the old Dick Cavett Show, in which she talked about 'leaving the light on at night' like a child; of 'well, yes, maybe my resources are a little more developed than other people's' (a classic example of the Sontag refusal of even the slightest bow to modesty); and also one profound statement which I have never forgotten: She spoke, in response to a question by Cavett, about some details about the cancer experience, saying 'They're not interesting. Of course, they're important to me, but I don't think they're interesting.' This was one of the finest examples I ever heard a major thinker make in dissecting what kind of information belongs where and what kind of data does not; and who in the midst of personal suffering had the intellectual wherewithal to be tough enough to make the difference and not get tearful. Much later, I would read of a visitor to Heidegger's home who reported that the man concerned throughout his life with the 'Being of beings' would say in an offhand manner 'Oh yes, circulatory problems…the inconveniences of old age.' Obviously, that would have come under his definition of 'idle talk.' We like to know that our titans can speak of the everyday sometimes.
The political stances and reversals are chronicled in many places, including the following very famous 1960's statement, which needs to be quoted in its entirety: "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." There are a number of reasons why this is both 'essential Sontag' and also that it is quite loathsome (and, as usual, has sparks of real truth within its unforgiving hardness.). I'll point out only two: That she felt perfectly comfortable in later years admitting that Shakespeare was her favourite writer; and also writing an introductory note to Tributes: Celebrating Fifty Years of New York City Ballet, where she proclaims Balanchine 'the greatest choreographer in history.' With all due respect, I am not entirely sure she knew that about Balanchine even though it is often considered to be true. Sometimes the 'fashionable Sontag' became the predominant persona in a big way.
The 60's was unquestionably the hottest period and the 'Notes on Camp' is indispensable reading for anyone interested in in Sontag. Always in a state of contradiction, Sontag was attracted to the largely homosexual phenomenon of camp culture and camp humour, but kept a distance from it as well (which she incidentally did as well about her sexual preference. She would never concede its existence officially, despite her importance as a feminist. I have always thought this was actually extremely wise; it would have become a pointless issue, especially given that there were so many others to take up the slack, were dying to get some publicity by talking about it.) 'Notes on Camp' catapulted her to fame, and equally brilliant essays on pornography, another called 'Fascinatin' Fascism' and a famous one on the great and disgraced Nazi director, actress, ballet dancer, and athlete Leni Riefenstahl, whose film on Hitler 'The Triumph of the Will' is still considered the greatest propaganda film ever made. This essay brought Sontag a lot of criticism, as she strongly defended Riefenstahl's artistry in spite of what content it may or may not have explicity proven Riefenstahl to hold dear. She would later recant this to a degree in an essay on a volume of photographs of an African tribe with whom Riefenstahl lived in the late 70's, claiming that in choosing 'beautiful bodies' Riefenstahl's Nazism was still very apparent. Some of this can be seen in the fine documentary film 'The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl.' While Riefenstahl came to wish she hadn't made 'The Triumph of the Will', she did say 'Oh, Susan Sontag! What an intelligent woman.. but such rubbish! I photographed these bodies, and some of them were beautiful, there is nothing significant about it…'
When Riefenstahl (who in her 90's had become the world's oldest scuba diver) died at 99 in 2003, I consciously thought 'Sontag somehow survived Riefenstahl. Obviously, she will not have the longevity, though.'
That is an example of the way Sontag was so frequently in my thoughts, but I don't think it is entirely solipsistic either. I think it points to how many kinds of experience she was capable of-something one might call an 'earth intellectual,' although I realize that it is insufficient like all labels and anyway I just made it up this second.
*
She was one of the earliest contributors to The New York Review of Books, a great journal of great writing which has periods that are better than others. Nevertheless, in the last years more of her work in the big print publications was to be found in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, the last being May 23, 2004's 'Regarding the Torture of Others,' about the Abu Ghraib photographs. She seemed to be really convinced that these photographs would have the desired effect on Rumsfeld and the rest of the involved Bush administration parties. This seemed a little incredible to me even then, unthinkable now, since they appear impervious to even the most skillful criticism.
I will say only a word about the novels before getting to the final part of the story, when I began to be aware of her as a kind of all-pervasive mind, having some thought of her here and there on nearly all walks I took in the Chelsea area (she lived in another penthouse by now, the Lincoln Terrace complex, far west on 23rd Street, about ten blocks up from me.) What I have to say is that I have found them unreadable, that I have read only half of the one called 'The Volcano Lover' which I thought had the ugliest prose style I had ever read by an intelligent person; that Elizabeth Hardwick, the founder of the New York Review of Books, with its tightest of cliques, said 'her novels are highly underrated' (incidentally Elizabeth Hardwick had much earlier dismissed Truman Capote's extraordinary first novel 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' as 'a minor imitation of a very talented minor writer Carson McCullers:' I fail to see that martinet Hardwick is even in the same league with either Capote or McCullers, or even her 'discovered darling' Susan Sontag. Sontag won a National Book Award for 'In America' in 2000, another novel set in a previous century and for which she also received accusations of plagiarism. Excerpts from her various novels have convinced me that her fiction is virtually worthless.
*
The huge publicity that accompanied Sontag's Sarajevo adventure was what began the period of a certain pre-occupation with her on my part.
This going into a war-torn, hungry, thirsty, bloody 1994 Bosnian capital and staging Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' has always bewildered me in terms of any claims she has made about it. I still am unable to see that doing this has the value of even what a single Red Cross worker has given-and working anonymously is not something Susan Sontag was going to do. She said at the time that she wanted to bring a sense of 'the normal life' to the people. But mortars and dodging bullets do not need the 'normal' in the sense of a flourishing theatergoing life, which requires a sense of leisure. My guess is that she found a visually depressing enough shelter to stay in for it to seem 'authentic enough' to her, but may have done less than the natives in terms of fetching buckets of water for long distances. It actually even seems to reduce Beckett's play within such a milieu into a mere 'depressing play,' rather than the profound work it is. Personally, I can see that such an impingement is of even less value than Mary Martin doing 'Hello, Dolly!' for the troops in Vietnam.
Jean Baudrillard said it best: "After all, Susan Sontag is from New York, and she can go to Sarajevo and explain their reality to them." This had to have stung in its unerring accuracy, and in the second YMHA reading in which I heard her, she made a point of saying 'for every Andre Gide there are ten Peter Handkes, ten Jean Baudrillards…'and that was just all pettiness.
*
In October, 1998, the New York Review of Books had its 35th Anniversary reading at the YMHA, and the readers included Elizabeth Hardwick, Jonathan Miller, Jason Epstein, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Alma Guillermoprieto, and others. Each read from his own works.
I went solely for Joan Didion. This was and is a kindred spirit whose works have meant as much to me as any other living artist. The sense of 'kindred artistic spirit' is the kind whose works seem to come to you when your own life is at various crossroads; and they inform your work, your travels, your thoughts. I am talking the kind of artist you can even think 'saves your life' with their work. But I was fascinated that the same evening was to include Sontag, and I had made comparisons between the two of them before, although I think the reasons for making such comparison were mostly spurious, juvenile, and sophomoric. (Later, I found an obscure online article which did this exact same thing, speaking of 'the two mandarins.' The writer did say, of the novels written by each, that 'Didion's are the better…' which does indeed go without saying.)
But as it turned out, Sontag's reading was by far the most thrilling, and apparently even carefully rehearsed, of all those appearing. She read her essay 'Under the Sign of Saturn' about Walter Benjamin, with marvelous deep tones in the voice, suggesting Athena (I later read that this had been a frequent part of the Sontag iconography) or a high priestess. She spoke of the 'corpulent man', of his love of his books, of his 'getting lost in cities.' Her reading was the inspiration for years of my reading of these texts, beginning with Adorno, continuing with Heidegger, Derrida, Barthes, Kafka, Proust, Genet and many others. She was dressed almost royally in some hybrid style which suggested something both baroque-- with lavender velvet pants, a burgundy cape-and perhaps a hint of some obscure unidentified figure of Commedia dell-Arte.
Joan Didion had just put on a black suit and slouched around the podium and slurrily and sexily read without a bit of thought to it an old piece about Central America. Even at her age, the skirt went three inches above the knee, and these were still legs worth looking at. After the readings were over, it was she to whom I ran and acted like some halfwit teenage idiot (nevermind the 30-year problem with that), telling her romantic-fool things about how I was afraid of her but that I had then just had to meet her. This dame is all coolness and just to touch her hand was sex.
So much for my ability to concentrate on 'high ideals' for very long. Susan Sontag had impressed me, but I knew we didn't have a thing to talk about.
*
Then came Sontag's notorious 9/11 essay in The New Yorker. It had the usual combination of brilliance and precision of accusation and Sontag narcissism as it spoke in a barely veiled way of the joined-at-the-hip alliance of the U.S. and Israel, of the bombings already taking place in Iraq, and how even with this 'monstrous reality' of the attacks, the attackers could not be construed as 'cowards.' She referred to Bush as a 'robotic president' and did not mention anything about the one moment when Rudolph Giuliani actually was able to use his particular kind of personality to very fine effect. In other words, it was both true and false, but at the time-only six days after the attacks-she seemed to be calling absurd attention to herself, and I have never fully forgiven it. It in no way, except for its fire, can approach the careful scholarship that accompanies the scathing critiques of U.S/Israeli policy (the laughable 'peace process') that Noam Chomsky presents so masterfully, calmly and frighteningly in his most recent book 'Hegemony and Survival' as well as previous peerless works.
She came under fierce attack and it was indeed deserved to the degree that she was unable to write a piece about something of such new uniqueness and on such a major worldwide traumatic scale without keeping her own ego out of it.
One month later, I heard her read at the YMHA for the second time. There was no 'Athena' in evidence at the event, to be sure, although she was wearing the same clothes from three years ago; just a catlike fierce woman seemingly looking for prey walking about the stage, and claiming 'I was right!' and 'It was all slander!' I had planned to scream at her and call her names, but was so angry I did not do so because I thought that screaming at her would gratify her, that it would resemble a Parisian 'Sacre du Printemps' sort of protest. After all, I already knew that she had managed to secure one of Jean-Paul Sartre's apartments and live in it as long as it may or may not have served to develop a sense of what she wanted her destiny to be. She revealed, perhaps inadvertently, that she had been in Berlin during the attacks, and had remained glued to the television there. Having seen the attacks directly, I know seeing it on television to be a very BIG difference. She actually said 'Unfortunately, I was not in New York,' as though that might have made the same difference in 'normal New York life' that 'Waiting for Godot' had made on the Sarajevans as they searched for clean water to drink. For one of her readings that night, she had the gall to read the 'answers' from a 'Questionaire for Intellectuals' which she prefaced with 'As is all too often the case, I was the only American asked to participate…' This kind of loathsome Sontag remark is the sort that can make you forget all the magnificent things she has opened to you.
However, the main reason I held off yelling at her in my fury was that, purely coincidentally, Joan Didion was reading from her newly published 'Political Fictions' at Queens College that following night. This would be the third time I would hear this woman read, and not by choice would I make it the last. It was rather because my insane crush was becoming all too apparent to her even though she flirted too (or I like to imagine she did. I know she thought I was funny). I couldn't keep asking her obnoxious questions during the Q&A sessions, going backstage to get ancient copies of 'Play It As It Lays' autographed by her, asking her for the addresses of the old Hollywood houses she lived in (and then going to them as if on pilgrimages!); mainly I couldn't keep infuriating her husband, John Gregory Dunne (a fine writer himself and who died on December 30 of 2003); and I decided I could not stand the thought of seeming like a stalker, so I decided to stop haunting her appearances. But during the Q&A with Joseph Cuomo, Didion did say 'Wasn't Giuliani amazing?' and 'he just used common sense to do it.' Before that, she had sat down and slowly taken a sweater off, and was annoyed that I was obviously watching every movement too closely.
For all we have since learned to hate Giuiliani for, the sense of his leadership immediately following the attacks was nevertheless very palpable, and both Didion and I had been in New York. Alas, I can't have her, but that's that. I don't think she minds that I'll always be a little smitten. Tough article, that one.
On January 16, 2003, Didion wrote a long and, as usual, stunningly brilliant piece for the New York Review of Books called 'The Hinge of History: Fixed Ideas Since September 11th.' In it she rather tepidly defended Susan Sontag's 9/11 New Yorker essay. I thought it was a half-assed paragraph, and still do. I wrote her that it was 'the first mediocre paragraph I have ever seen you write;' and 'did you really mean 'Giuliani was amazing' when I heard you say it to Joe Cuomo last year?' At least she knows I'm not just some groupie.
*
There were a few more publications of Sontag books in the last few years and an article in the New Yorker about Dostoyevsky and how to love him despite his anti-Semitism, especially if one is also Jewish (who but Sontag would be writing something like this?). There was an interesting interview that she did with Mikhail Baryshnikov sometime in 2003 about the cultural center in Manhattan that he will be directing. Her customary fire was still intact at that point.
And finally, there was the New York Times Magazine article in May, 2004, in which her inability to face what was already apparent, if not perhaps proved until Kerry's defeat, was revealed in her superbly written documentation of the Abu Ghraib torture photos. The last word in the piece 'Regarding the Torture of Others' (echoing her recent book 'Regarding the Pain of Others') is a single sentence: 'Unstoppable.' I read it and wished it to be true and already knew that it wouldn't be.
It was a fine article, but I consciously noticed that the Sontag fire was gone. In its place was still courage though, a word I am surprised to be using in regard to her, because in the 9/11 piece she had called 'courage' a 'morally neutral virtue.' However possible it might be to construe this as true in certain circumstances, to have said so at that time was quite uncalled-for.
The cooler writers like Noam Chomsky, Joan Didion, and even, comparatively speaking, Paul Krugman (who is pretty passionate and close to the edge sometimes) have the most lasting appeal to me in their journalism. But actually, Susan Sontag and Jean Baudrillard, two of the world's loudest mouths, have not only both spit at each other and almost everybody else, but have in common a different, possibly equally valuable, kind of gift: They spout all sorts of reckless nonsense full of passion and fury and irony and meanness (not to mention inaccuracy, sometimes purposely so), and in the process truths that the cooler writers will not find with their more tempered sorts of apparatus will be unearthed. Both Sontag and Baudrillard are full of outrageous risk. For me, both are loved without being exactly 'loveable.' Only very rarely are my reactions to either unalloyed.
Susan Sontag was highly identified with New York for the last decades of her life. She was as much a part of it as any creative artist working here today. I knew that her death would bring a huge sensation of something lost for New York, and for all my rage at some of what she presented which still continues even after her death, I already miss her very deeply. There was much of Athena's 'protector of the Arts' in her.
In 1973, Susan Sontag wrote an extraordinary essay on Antonin Artaud for The New Yorker, the only thing I ever read of hers that was current during that still relatively fresh period. The last words were that Artaud's work was 'ultimately inassimilable.'
In some ways, this phrase seems to uncannily capture something of the glittering and troubling phenomenon we have long known as Susan Sontag. Although she was (and is) the definitive 'protector of the Arts,' I remain unconvinced that she was herself an artist.
