Susan Sontag (Telegraph)
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 29/12/2004)
Susan Sontag, the American novelist and essayist who died
yesterday aged 71, was a paragon of radical intelligence and
austere beauty of whom it was said that, if she had not
existed, the New York Review of Books would have had to
invent her.
Called "the most intelligent woman in America" by Jonathan
Miller, Susan Sontag was a slow, unprolific writer who
agonised over her work. In 25 years of grind, she produced
six slender volumes of crafted essays. Published intially in
popular magazines and periodicals, her work made intelligent
criticism of modern culture acceptable and had a profound
effect on future generations of authors, critics and
journalists.
Sontag's first essay, Notes on 'Camp' - an analysis of the
preference of some people for tat rather than art - was
published in the Partisan Review in 1964. Camp, she wrote,
was a form of consumption that converted "bad" art such as
comic strips into a source of refined pleasure, ignoring
intention and relishing style.
This sounded like an attack on elite culture, delivered with
the skill and authority of someone well-educated in that
culture. Added to her defence of such modernist icons as
John Cage, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Godard, it earned
Susan Sontag the titles "Queen Camp" and "the Natalie Wood
of the avant garde".
In fact, Susan Sontag's favourite author was Shakespeare,
and she was at pains to point out that she did not want to
promote bleak modernism for its own sake. "All my work says
be serious, be passionate; wake up," she said. "You have to
be a member of a capitalist society in the late 20th century
to understand that seriousness itself could be in question."
There were few strip cartoons in her own library. An avid
reader from early childhood, she possessed a collection of
15,000 volumes and could talk fluently across the arts and
humanities, on philosophy, literature, film, opera,
neurology, psychology or church architecture. She always
found time to read; she said that the memory of her drunken
mother sleeping away her life provoked her to make do with
four hours' sleep a night.
Critics who denigrated her as "pseudo-intellectual"
overlooked the fact that Susan Sontag employed her
seriousness to defend the senses against the intellect.
In Against Interpretation - the title of her first
collection of essays published in 1966 - she damned Freudian
and Marxist interpretation that "excavates; destroys; digs
behind the text to find a subtext which is the true one".
Interpretation destroyed energy and "sensual capability". It
was the "revenge of intellect upon art. Even more. It is the
revenge of intellect upon the world."
Despite her awesome abilities as a critic, Susan Sontag was
at war with herself. In part, she wanted to be an
unthinking, passionate artist. Early on she wrote two
novels - The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) - but
these were more intellectual than passionate. As she grew
older, the need to express herself grew stronger.
It was not until 1992 that she felt she had done herself
justice with her novel The Volcano Lover, a heady mixture of
intellect and eroticism, about the love triangle between
William Hamilton, his wife Emma and Lord Nelson.
The book was "released" in Susan Sontag after a conversation
with her psychiatrist in which she discovered that her
difficulty in writing a popular novel came from a fear that
giving readers pleasure might seem trivial. "What worried me
was that I would not be writing essays, because they have a
powerful ethical impulse," she said. "But my psychiatrist
said: 'What makes you think it isn't a contribution to give
people pleasure?'"
Susan Sontag was born in Arizona on January 16 1933. Her
father was a furrier with a business based in China, where
he spent much of his time. Her mother, an alcoholic of great
beauty, was so afraid of growing old that she forbade her
daughters to call her "mother" in public. Susan and her
sister lived most of their early childhood with an
illiterate Irish nurse.
When she was five, Susan's father died in China. Afterwards,
her mother took to travelling a great deal. "I don't know
where she went or what she did," Susan said. "I guess she
had boyfriends.".
The family became poor and moved to Los Angeles. Susan read
books "to ward off the jovial claptrap of classmates and
teachers, the maddening bromides I heard at home". By the
age of seven she had read a six-volume edition of Les
Misérables and had become a socialist. At 14 she took a
schoolfriend to tea with Thomas Mann, then living in exile
in Los Angeles.
At Hollywood High, when Susan was 15, her principal told her
that she had outstripped her teachers and sent her to
Berkeley, from where she went to Chicago University. At 17
she married Philip Rieff, a lecturer in social theory 11
years her senior, after a 10-day courtship. She heard one
student telling another that Rieff had married a "14-year
old Indian".
Rieff provided her with intellectual companionship. At
Boston University he wrote about Freud while she took
masters degrees in English and Philosophy and added an MA
from Harvard. They had a son, David, but in 1958 the couple
separated for a year when Sontag took up a fellowship at
Oxford. There she was influenced by the teaching of Iris
Murdoch and AJ Ayer, but found student life equally
engrossing. "It was being young in a way I had never allowed
myself to be," she recalled.
On her return to America she divorced Rieff and set off for
New York with her son, two suitcases and $70. Her lawyer
told her she was the first woman in Californian history to
have refused alimony. She taught at Columbia University
while writing The Benefactor, and began working on the
essays that would secure her reputation.
In addition to Against Interpretation, she published the
collections Styles Of Radical Will (1969); On Photography
(1977); Illness As Metaphor (1978); Under The Sign Of Saturn
(1980) and Aids and Its Metaphors (1989). She also wrote
four films and appeared as herself in Zelig, Woody Allen's
mock-documentary.
The best of her essays conveyed dense thought in casual,
almost thrown-away paragraphs and sentences. They were
demanding in the same way that poetry is demanding; each
learned reference was used as selectively as a poet might
use images. Such pared-down elegance was the refined product
of grim endeavour. An essay of a few thousand words took her
six to nine months to write. "I've thousands of pages for a
30-page essay," she said, "30 or 40 drafts of each page."
From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, Sontag lived in Paris.
In 1976 she was diagnosed with breast cancer and returned to
America. Ignoring the advice of American oncologists, she
had radically high doses of chemotherapy for two and a half
years; the odds were against her living. "I was terrified,"
she said. "Horrible grief. Above all, to leave my son. And I
loved life so much. I was never tempted to say `that's it'.
I love it when people fight for their lives."
She never became rich from her writing, but was adept at
securing grants and scholarships. In necessity, friends
helped her out; the money for her cancer treatment was
raised by Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of
Books. It was not until The Volcano Lover that she acquired
an agent; and only in 1990, when she was awarded a handsome
MacArthur fellowship, was she secure enough to buy her
apartment in New York.
Susan Sontag had a high political profile. She visited Hanoi
during the Vietnam war (after which she described the white
race as "the cancer of human history") and in 1993 she
directed a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo when
that city was under siege. She was a vociferous critic of
the Soviet Union - particularly in its treatment of
writers - and was president of PEN in 1987. Days after the
attacks of September 11 2001, she criticised American
foreign policy, referring to the terrorists' behaviour as
"an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower,
undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances
and actions".
She was a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Though known for her hauteur and not indifferent to her
public image, Sontag avoided the "celebrity" circuit. Her
highbrow attitude made enemies, foremost among them the
American academic Camille Paglia, best-known for her
enthusiasm for the pop singer Madonna. Paglia never forgave
Sontag for snubbing her at a party in 1973. By the late
1980s she was declaring that her intellect had eclipsed
Sontag's. "I've been chasing that bitch for 25 years," said
Paglia, "and at last I've caught her."
"We used to think Norman Mailer was bad," said Susan Sontag,
"but she makes Norman Mailer look like Jane Austen."
In 2000 she published a novel, In America, about the 19th
century Polish actress Helena Modjeska. Although she was
criticised for unauthorised use of source material, it won
her the National Book Award.
Susan Sontag never re-married, and her close relationships
with several women provoked speculation; in 1999 she wrote
an essay for Women, a compilation of portraits by her
longtime friend, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. "I don't
talk about my erotic life any more than I do my spiritual
life," she said. "It is too complex and always ends up
sounding so banal."
She is survived by her son, David, whom she described as her
"best friend".