Susan Sontag (Routledge Revivals)

The Elegiac Modernist

Sohnya Sayres

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317612551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

First published in 1990, this is the first book-length study of Susan Sontag: essayist and analyst of culture, author of 'Notes on Camp' and Illness as Metaphor, novelist, reviewer, and filmmaker. It was modernism, and the excitement it created in her, that "rescued" Sontag from childhood in Southern California and sent her abroad in the 1950s. Sohnya Sayres looks into the foundations and directions of Sontag's imposing work and in doing so discovers a unity of design and subject that Sontag has only recently acknowledged to have been an ambition all along. Sayres's Sontag is the "elegiac modernist", committed to a modernism whose high noon has long since passed. And yet Sayres finds in Sontag's lifelong indebtedness to modernism's aesthetic an inherent conservatism. While guiding us through the work of a brilliant critic, Sayres questions whether Sontag is not herself caught in the paradoxes of the modernism she herself so much admires. A comprehensive analysis of the work of a remarkable intellectual, this title will be of value to any student of American modernism and literary life.

1
Biographical Notes

The “besotted aesthete” “obsessed moralist,” and “zealot of seriousness,” as Sontag thinks of herself, was conceived in China where her mother and father negotiated in the trade of animal skins in Tien-tsin (Tianjin). She carries images of them in her mind as the glittering and least concerned of foreigners, “playing Gatsby and Daisy at the British Concession.” Her grandparents’ house was filled with the Chinese jades and porcelains of the kind “colonialists collect.” Her mother returned to New York City to deliver Sontag, January 16, 1933, and then went back to China leaving the baby behind in the grandparents’ care. (She was raised “mostly by aunts.”) Whether these were her maternal or paternal grandparents Sontag has not yet revealed. Nor has she ever given her mother’s maiden name or her father’s name, though one or the other is probably Jacobson. People magazine published a photograph of Sontag and her younger sister Judith standing on either side of grandfather Charles Jacobson. Sontag was her stepfather’s name.

The child may have liked the specialness in all this, the glamorous, absent parents; the marvelous, obscure Orient that held her parents and filled her house with treasures. One of the first lies Sontag remembers telling is bragging to her classmates that she was born in China. She was so convincing in that guise that even her parents’ Chinese friends would tell her that she looked Chinese. She does not, of course, not a trace. But then, her household seemed to compound the effect of a deracinated, wandering identity. Sontag told Geoffrey Movius in 1975:

If immigrants retained a tie with their country or culture of origin, it was very selective. The main impulse was to forget. I once asked my father’s mother, who died when I was seven, where she came from. She said, “Europe.” Even at six I knew that wasn’t a very good answer. I said, “But where, Grandma?” She repeated testily, “Europe.” And so to this day, I don’t know from what country my paternal grandparents came. But I have photographs of them, which I cherish, which are like the mysterious tokens of all that I don’t know about them. (Movius 13)

Sontag’s sister Judith was born in New York in 1936, and again their mother returned to China to help with the export business. At this age Sontag was already beginning to read independently and, she believes, thinking about “moral” things. She has not mentioned if anyone noticed or encouraged her. She leaves us with the impression, rather, that her inner life formed under the pressure of self-defense and that it sprang entirely from her. (“I think of myself as self-created—that’s my working illusion” [Cott 53]). One wonders what was happening in that first household, if, for instance, the Depression or a prescience of the coming world calamities ever filtered in under the door. She does hint that the family moved around a lot and that until she was an adolescent she shared a room with her sister. Perhaps the shock of her father’s death in 1938 overrode those memories. He died of tuberculosis in China; Sontag is not sure where he is buried.

“I still weep in any movie with a scene in which a father returns home after a long, desperate absence, at the moment when he hugs his child. Or children,” she writes in “Project for a Trip to China,” a short story that is set on the eve of her departure to China as an official visitor. Her oldest wounds open on the page as she considers how she understands things Chinese and what she expects from this trip. Mother merges into “M.” in the short story, and we hear how M. had waited several months before she had told Sontag her father was not coming back. She was brief, writes Sontag. “Dearest Μ. I cannot telephone. I am six years old. My grief falls like snowflakes on the warm soil of your indifference. You are inhaling your own pain.”

Sontag confesses that she has been bitter, that she is not sure she has forgiven her mother, if one can forgive. But that thought rests in her knowledge that there has been continuity and repetition in grief between the generations. M.’s own mother died in Los Angeles when she was only fourteen; the grandmother had been born in Bialystok. Sontag recalls M. telling her of how, on her way to New York to visit her daughters, she was not allowed to leave the sealed cars that foreigners rode in on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. When the train stopped in Bialystok, she wept. “She wanted to feel the ground of her mother’s faraway birthplace under her feet. Just once.… She didn’t tell me she wept, but I know she did. I see her.”

The other possibility is that M. had already learned how to immunize herself in the face of departures. Perhaps she had not wept, perhaps she imparted to her daughter an “Oriental detachment.” What Sontag is more sure of, which she has mentioned in several places, is that childhood was a prison for her, a kind of sentencing against which she used all the force of her will and intellect to escape.

That escape did not take very long. Sontag showed asthmatic symptoms in 1939 and her mother decided to take her and Judith to Tucson, Arizona, to live in a modest stucco bungalow on a dirt road at the outskirts of town. They had an Irish nanny, who was “notionally salaried” and with whom Sontag went to Catholic services on Sunday. About her religious upbringing she has said, “My family, which was Jewish, did not practice. The first time I was in a synagogue I was twenty-four years old. I was visiting Florence, when I passed for the first time in front a synagogue that had a plaque with the names of the Jews of Florence who had been deported to Auschwitz, and I entered” (Costa 187).

Her mother took a job teaching school. In that feminine world, the tall child accelerated. “Childhood was a terrible waste of time,” she told the People magazine interviewer, Barbara Rowes. “I was put in 1A on Monday when I was 6 years old. Then IB on Tuesday, 2A on Wednesday, 2B on Thursday, and by the end of the week they had skipped me to third grade because I could do the work” (Rowes 79). She never got less than an “A” grade after that.

Recently, when asked the beginning of her interest in the moral, Sontag remarked:

I believe that it began when I was three years old. In other aspects, I am not very clear about when I was young, which is a source of strength and a problem at the same time. I remember that I would think much on the things that I think about now before I was ten years old. If I were able to begin again, I would give myself a greater capacity to enjoy my childhood. (Costa 187)

To have gained a beautiful, young, sorrowing mother at the cost of a father barely met; to have been taken from her grandparents and sent to live, on account of her own inexplicable weakness, so much like her father’s, in the American desert; to soon lose her paternal grandmother, that woman of vague places—what a hard mixture of mourning and guilt and dislocation the child must have borne. She may have also sensed a strange empowerment—to be now at the center of concern and quite likely the center of delight for the newly constituted household. She had inward gifts, already exceptional and outward energies for which no father was around to mold or to dampen. She had discovered writing, all kinds, at age six or seven. Soon, she would ride about the neighborhood on her bicycle selling for 5 cents a four-page journal of articles and stories she had created and run off on an old hectograph machine. She wrote plays and poems and short stories. Into her adolescence she wanted to be a chemist (she set up a chemistry lab in a garage), then a doctor, but always a writer, too. In fact, she says, she thought seriously again, in her twenties, about becoming a physician, and even now sometimes muses that she is sorry she never studied medicine. But she does study pain and disease, in several short stories and in the famous essays on illnesses and metaphors, as perhaps she has always been studying them, intimately and with the certainty, that for one to be free, disease must be stripped of its unscientific, “controlling metaphors.”

Her lungs got stronger in the desert. Apparently the asthma does not now trouble her or, at least it did not force her to stop smoking until 1987 (after “being a constant victim of the terrorism” of the anti-smoking campaign). She grew tall and slender; at eleven she is taller than her grandfather in the photograph and looking older, more confident by many years, than her actual age. She was already pushing herself when the second blow fell, a determining blow. For when she was twelve, her mother remarried, to a “handsome, bemedalled, and beshrapnelled Army Airforce Ace who’d been sent to the healing desert to cap a year-long hospitalization” (“Pilgrimage” 38). Captain Sontag soon took his new family to Canoga Park, a suburb of Los Angeles, to a “cozy shuttered cottage with rosebush hedges and three birch trees at the entrance to the San Fernando Valley.” Here the “resident alien,” “pretending to sit still for a facsimile of family life and the remainder of the unconvincing childhood,” was, in fact, “already gone.”

On weekends my out-of-uniform but still militarily perky stepfather marshalled sirloins and butter-brushed com tightly wrapped in tinfoil on the patio barbecue; I ate and ate—how could I not, as I watched my morose, bony mother fiddling with her food. His animation was as threatening as her apathy. They couldn’t start playing family now—too late! I was off and running…. (“Pilgrimage” 38)

“The end was almost in sight.” She would finish high school while still fifteen and be off to college. If she never moped or sulked (the “truth was, I dreaded conflict”), she had the arrogance of adolescence to protect her: “What other people thought of me remained a dim consideration, since other people seemed to me astonishingly unseeing and uncurious, while I longed to learn everything”: and she had the special privilege of having it never occur to her “that I could be stopped.” There was also a “flip side” to her discontent. In California she had a room of her own, literally, for the first time. “The demon reader in her” (“to read was to drive a knife into their lives”) experienced “near nightly bouts of jubilation.” She became a different “Lone Ranger” than she had been in Arizona; instead of snakes and arrowheads, she tracked down real bookstores, international bookstands, record shops, and, with her friends, the artists that war-protected and postwar-exuberant Los Angeles had harbored. She writes about this rapture over art in “Pilgrimage”; it is in many ways a very believable portrait of her hurried-up, urgent youth, rescued at the tenderest points and in the earliest stages by an enthralldom to art and ideas. In another interview, she reminisces:

[when] I was a fifteen-year-old kid at North Hollywood High School, I discovered a newsstand on the comer of Hollywood and Highland that carried literary magazines. I’d never seen a literary magazine before; certainly ľd never seen anybody read one. I picked up Partisan Review and started to read “ Art and Fortune” by Lionel Trilling; and I just began to tremble with excitement. And from then on, my dream was to grow up, move to New York and write for the Partisan Review. Then within a year, ľd read all the New Critics and had become a great fan of Kenneth Burke. The following year I went to the University of Chicago where I became a student of Kenneth Burke’s. Nobody knows that I was a student of Burke’s. (Copeland 87)

She stayed at the University of California at Berkeley for only a year, and then transferred to her first choice, the University of Chicago. As the story goes, she decided one winter morning in 1950 to audit a course on Freud taught by an interesting young lecturer, Philip Rieff. She had to walk to the back of the room for the last empty seat, and when the lecture was over, she was the last to leave. “He was standing at the door and he grabbed my arm and asked my name. I apologized and told him I had only come to audit. ‘No, what’s your name?’ he persisted. ‘Will you have lunch with me?’ “ (Rowes 79). They were married ten days later: Sontag was 17 and Rieff 28.

What did this abruptness solve? It is hard to say. Sexuality, of course, but also, surely, a way to carry her excitement through and onto a plain of company—the graduate students, the young professors—already working on what she had been thinking about. Philip Rieff would go on to be an important sociologist, nearly himself a household name. He could sweep her up, help her leap past the tedium and “drivel” she had sworn to ward off, into a place where politics, ideas, questions of morality, were actually written about.

One can only guess from this story what Sontag thought of her exceptional looks. Men usually do not grab the arm of merely brilliant women. She never wears make-up, and until chemotherapy, had no cause to treat her lustrous black hair. When asked about her cerebralness, she is quick to describe herself as a lively, curious, sensuous person. She did write a piece when she turned forty called “The Double Standard of Aging” which by inference suggests her consciousness of facing a changing set of relationships. However, the essay includes only one direct reference to herself, and that was when she was sixteen. She recalls being mystified by her friend’s fear of turning twenty-one. “I didn’t understand at all what could be demoralizing about turning twenty-one. To me it meant only something good: being in charge of oneself, being free. At sixteen, I was too young to have noticed and become confused by, the peculiarly loose, ambivalent way in which this society demands that one stop thinking of oneself as a girl and start thinking of oneself as a woman” (“The Double Standard …” 33). In marrying Rieff, she helped others, perhaps helped herself, think of her as a woman.

In 1951 Sontag completed her B.A. at Chicago and then she and Rieff moved to Boston where he taught at Brandeis. She must have kept her habit of auditing classes. Irving Howe remembers her in the back of his lectures at Brandeis in these years, as a woman of radiating beauty and intelligence. The next year she enrolled at Harvard, graduating with an M.A. in English (1954) and an M.A. in philosophy (1955). In the meantime, two weeks after she had enrolled as a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Harvard, she gave birth to her first and only child, David (September 28, 1952). “I named him David after the Michelangelo sculpture” (Rowes 79).

David would be her nearly constant companion in the following years. He was the big, dark-eyed boy in the background of the few interviews she granted in the 1960s. Once he remarked about his grammar school life, “Susan was not the type to go to PTA meetings.” She responded, “I have nothing against the PTA. I’m just allergic to institutions” (Rowes 80). At thirteen, James Toback describes him as having “slipped into conversations on Reichian analysis and the philosophy of history with the self-assurance of a Harvard graduate student” (Toback 60). In contradiction to Sontag’s swift movement through school, David took his time completing a degree at Princeton, a matter she sometimes teased him about. But still in his twenties he joined her as a fellow at the New York Institute of the Humanities, and along with her became an editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. “My first editor,” Sontag tells Charles Ruas, “was the late Cecil Hemley, then Robert Giroux, and starting with ‘Under the Sign of Saturn,’ my editor has been David Rieff, who also happens to be my son. Someone said to David, ‘Don’t you think you’re mixing church and state?’ But I am very pleased with the arrangement. I have great confidence in Mr. Rieff’s judgement” (Ruas 39). She has hinted that before David’s position as her editor was acknowledged he was the first and usually the only person to see her pieces before they were sent out. About this arrangement she has said, “But I really shouldn’t [do this] because it is probably a great burden to him. I just can’t resist the feeling that it [a piece of writing] exists first for just one other person, before it goes to the editor” (Brennan 102). David Sontag Rieff has recently published a book on Miami.¹

When David was a newborn, Sontag commuted to the University of Storrs, Connecticut, to lecture in English. From 1966–7 she was a teaching fel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Biographical Notes
• 2. Key Terms
• 3. The Two Novels: The Benefactor and Death Kit
• 4. The Burden of the Aesthetic
• 5. Thought Commemorated
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index