Susan Sontag / Her Life and Work

 

Sontag: Her Life and Work
by Benjamin Moser
(Ecco, Sept. 2019)

Reviewed by Stephen Piccarella

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work is the first authorized biography of Susan Sontag, the greatest cultural critic of the twentieth century. The book spans almost a hundred years of cultural and political history, and examines all of Sontag’s published and unpublished work, ranging from fictionalized memoir to academic writing on psychoanalysis to reporting on her experience producing a play in war-torn Bosnia. Moser is a recognized translator and biographer of Clarice Lispector, and to produce this latest work he spent seven years studying a massive archive of Sontag’s papers and interviewing her associates and intimates, some of them family members, others elite publishing luminaries. The book is not as exhaustive as some biographies, but tells the story of a life and of an era with diligence and enthusiasm. Moser’s does what a biography must, and well enough given the outsized reputation of its subject. For a general readership, Sontag is likely to stand alone as an authoritative work. 

Susan Sontag and George Steiner / The Last Jewish Intellectuals

 

Susan Sontag

The Last Jewish Intellectuals

Susan Sontag and George Steiner star in ‘Maestros & Monsters’

BY

DAVID MIKICS

NOVEMBER 26, 

“Have you ever been given an order and just followed it? Or are you incapable of keeping your mouth shut and doing what you’re told?” Susan Sontag said to a cab driver who proposed a faster way to get downtown. His response was predictable: Get out of my cab. “You can’t be serious!” a genuinely surprised Sontag exclaimed, and then trudged home through the heavy rain.

‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde

 

‘He was a born member of the underground’: how Peter Hujar captured the New York demimonde

This article is more than 4 months old

He only published one book – and it was hardly noticed. Now his portraits of drag queens, poets and artists are seen as vital documents of a vanished world. As they go on show, the photographer’s favourite subjects recall his genius

Alex Needham

Mon 15 Apr 2024 16.51 BST

H

e made me wear white,” says Fran Lebowitz, down the phone from New York. The writer is talking about the day her close friend, the photographer Peter Hujar, shot her for Portraits in Life and Death, the only book he ever made. “Peter was very specific. It was in my apartment which was the size of, I don’t know, a book. And the light was a big thing – as it was with all photographers, back when they were actually photographers.”

 

Susan Sontag

"The Professor and Other Writings": A critic gets personal

Terry Castle discusses her sexually charged new memoir -- and why Susan Sontag stayed in the closet

By JED LIPINSKI

PUBLISHED JANUARY 26, 2010 6:20AM (UTC)

Susan Sontag once called Terry Castle “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” But her new book, "The Professor and Other Writings," proves she's one of our most expressive and enlightening memoirists as well.

Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag’s Queer Life

Reflections on Susan Sontag have yet to fully reckon with how fundamentally queerness shaped her writing and her life. Benjamin Moser’s controversial new biography Sontag finally begins that conversation.

Alessa Dominguez
Culture Writer
Posted on September 25, 2019, at 1:54 p.m. ET

Susan Sontag’s fame was always paradoxical. It made no sense that a writer publishing in the so-called little magazines, like Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, on topics like structuralist philosophy or the history of interpretation, could cross over to become a major literary star. But, improbably, she did.

Terry Castle / Desperately Seeking Susan

 

Desperately Seeking Susan

Terry Castle

Vol. 27 No. 6 · 17 March 2005

Afew weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus’s obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of I, Et Cetera. She’s wearing a thin grey turtleneck and lies on her back – arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There’s a slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing which I like: very true to life. Every few hours now she floats up onscreen in this digitised format, supine, sleek and flat-chested.

The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle / Review

 

The Professor and Other Writings by Terry Castle - review

A brilliantly funny revenge memoir

Elaine Showalter
Sat 23 Apr 2011 00.06 BST

W

riting a memoir is the best revenge, and indeed, as Terry Castle ruefully acknowledges in "The Professor", "writing . . . is often nothing but revenge". Castle is professor of English at Stanford University, and a specialist in 18th-century English literature, as well as lesbian literary theory and literary history. But in the past decade she has also become recognised as an outstanding public intellectual, memoirist and culture critic.

The vengeful side of Castle's work first came to public attention through "Desperately Seeking Susan", her essay published in the London Review of Books in March 2005, just a few months after Susan Sontag's death. Here, Castle detailed her "on-again, off-again semi-friendship" with the great woman in which she played the humble groupie to Sontag's imperious star. She served as Sontag's chauffeur around southern California, a sympathetic audience for her kvetching about academics, an eager player in her games of intellectual one-upmanship, a purveyor of lesbian gossip to her closeted but insatiably curious androgynous persona ("I've loved men, Terry, I've loved women").

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work / Review by Terry Castle

 

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work 

BOOKS
TERRY CASTLE
December 2019

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco) succeeds as it does—magnificently, humanely—by displaying the same intellectual purchase, curiosity, and moral capaciousness to which his subject laid so inspiring and noble a claim over a lifetime. Susan Sontag was a difficult, galvanic presence in American arts and letters for half a century, and her biographer takes her measure with unfailing intelligence, honesty, and sympathy.

Patti Smith
by Jilliam Tamaki

How Susan Sontag Influenced Patti Smith’s Reading Life

September 5, 2019

“She advised me to read more German authors,” says the writer and singer, whose latest memoir is “Year of the Monkey.”

What books are on your nightstand?

There are four books on my bed table, three I’ve nearly finished. “St. Paul: A Screenplay” is the treatment Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote for an unrealized film, a modern take on St. Paul’s ministry. “The Ghost in the Shell: Five New Short Stories” is a collection of cool spinoffs inspired by the manga-anime series. Anthony Alofsin’s “Wright and New York” traces the transitive relationship of the architect and the city, as well as the genesis of the bohemian culture of the East Village. I’m about to go on tour, so the unread “Signs Preceding the End of the World,” by Yuri Herrera, will happily come with me on the road.

Susan Sontag / The Hunger Artist

Sontag says of her fiction, “I discovered that I liked to tell stories and make people cry.”Photograph By Richard Avedon

The Hunger Artist

Is there anything Susan Sontag doesn’t want to know?

By Joan Acocella
February 28, 2000

Susan Sontag did two big things last year. She finished a novel, “In America,” which is being published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux this week, and she underwent treatment for cancer. On a recent evening I said to her, “This is now your second novel in eight years, but it wasn’t novels you were known for—it was essays. Don’t you miss the essay form?” She answered something like “Essays! Pooh! Forget essays! That was the past. From now on, I’m writing fiction. I have a whole new life. It’s going to be terrific.” And she began charting for me her happy future. This was a person who that same morning, as she told me, had been scanned in every inch of her body for cancer. (Her recent episode was not the first. She had breast cancer in the late seventies.) Furthermore, as a result of chemotherapy—specifically, a drug called cisplatin, with a platinum base—she has heavy-metal poisoning. For months last year, she was in terrible pain—she lived on morphine derivatives, meanwhile trying to finish the book—and couldn’t walk without help. Now she can walk, but her balance is still uncertain. “I don’t know where my feet are unless I look at them,” she told me. She has physical therapy for three hours every day.

Igmar Bergman / Persona / Review by Susan Sontag

• 
  

PERSONA 

Review by Susan Sontag

One impulse is to take Bergman’s masterpiece for granted. Since 1960 at least, with the breakthrough into new narrative forms propagated with most notoriety (if not greatest distinction) by Last Year in Marienbad, audiences have continued to be educated by even more elliptical and complex work. As Resnais’ imagination was subsequently to surpass itself in Muriel, a succession of ever more difficult and rewarding films has turned up in recent years. But that good fortune releases nobody who cares about films from acclaiming work as original and triumphant as Persona. It is depressing that the film has thus far received only a fraction of the attention it deserves – at least in New York and Paris. (At the moment of writing, it hasn’t yet opened in London.)

• 

SUSAN SONTAG: THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW 

(1979)

The writer reflects on her bout with cancer, the fundamentals of love, and her “desert childhood”

by Jonathan Cott

The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind,” wrote the late political scientist Hannah Arendt, ”is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.”
Susan Sontag is an exemplary witness to the fact that living a thinking life and thinking about the life one is living can be complementary and energizing activities. Since the 1966 publication of Against Interpretation — her first collection of essay, which included the brilliant ”Notes on ‘Camp”’ and ”On Style” and which ranged joyously and unpatronizingly from the Supremes to Simone Weil, from films like The Incredible Shrinking Man to Muriel — Sontag has continued to be drawn to both ”popular” and ”high” cultures and to write about subjects as diverse as pornography and photography, the aesthetics of silence and the aesthetics of fascism. In doing so, moreover, she has been continually examining and testing out her notion that supposed oppositions like thinking and feeling, consciousness and sensuousness, morality and aesthetics can in fact simply be looked at as aspects of each other — much like the pile on the velvet that, upon reversing one’s touch, provides two textures and two ways of feeling, two shades and two ways of perceiving.

Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean – review

Dean’s group biography of female writers who dared speak their mind is a great and worthy project

Rachel Cooke

Tue 8 May 2018



Joan Didion, pictured circa 1977, is among the women chronicled. Photograph: Alamy

I

n recent years, the group biography has become a spirited mainstay of the publishing landscape: a means both of revisiting and reinterpreting already familiar times, people and places, and of bringing together between hard covers lives that might not be deserving of an individual doorstop. In Sharp, though, Michelle Dean has assembled not so much a group as a small crowd: her book, with its title that brings to mind suddenly puckered lips, has the feeling of a cocktail party at which several people drink too much, nearly everyone talks too loudly, and no one really likes anyone else. Through this gathering, she wanders, ashtray in one hand, dishcloth in the other. Dean relishes her guests’ bad behaviour – you might call her a little starstruck – but only to a degree. As the evening goes on, she will sometimes find herself apologising for them, these women who are so clever and talented, and yet so madly competitive, so stubbornly reluctant to attach the word “feminist” to their neon-bright names.

But we’re running ahead of ourselves; no need to reach for the dustpan and brush just yet. Who are these brilliant, pugnacious visitors? All are writers, the majority American. Most began as journalists, making an art, as Dean’s subtitle has it, of “having an opinion”; some then went on to write acclaimed novels, and other kinds of books. Most of their names are well known: Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Mary McCarthy, Dorothy Parker, Susan Sontag, Rebecca West. Others, at least for British readers, may be less familiar: Janet Malcolm, whose singular, often controversial interviews appeared in the New Yorker; Pauline Kael, once the same magazine’s acerbic film critic; Renata Adler, the reporter whose home was also there until she put the literary equivalent of a bomb under her career. Dean gives each one about the same amount of attention, although it’s clear that she enjoys the company of some more than others. The playwright Lillian Hellman and the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, however, she collides with so fleetingly, they appear before the reader like gatecrashers or, more likely, additions to the guest list so embarrassingly last minute she can hardly bear to do much more than pour them their first sidecar.

A book is for any woman who has ever silenced a dinner table by being just a little too quick, too knowing, too mocking

What unites them, besides their trade and their talent? Dean talks, in her preface, of their remarkable achievements in a world that “was not eager to hear women’s opinions about anything”; of the way they roundly defied expectations. But there’s also the adjective of her title: sharp. People did not always respond favourably to the “sting” of their words. What would have seemed daring and deeply smart coming from a man appeared only haughty, inappropriate and unkind when served up by a woman. Such taking of offence is, of course, somewhat odd when you think about it, because their other problem of perception had to do with gravity. How, after all, was anyone (for which read: any man) supposed to take them seriously? Some (Ephron, Parker) were in the business of jokes; others wrote about sex and marriage (Ephron again, McCarthy). Malcolm was into (how very dubious) psychoanalysis. Didion, in her tiny dresses, her wrists like clay pipes, was just so much surface and “swank”. Dean, a journalist herself, sympathises with all this; her book – though these are my words, not hers – is for any woman who has ever silenced a dinner table by being just a little too quick, too knowing, too mocking. Am I allowed to say that I have more than once done just that? Maybe I am.

Another thing her subjects have in common is that they tend not to go in for false modesty or, indeed, modesty of any kind. “I hear you’re the new me,” McCarthy is supposed to have said to Sontag at a party in the late 60s. For all of these women, “me” really was a thing worth being.

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 American author Dorothy Parker circa 1935. Photograph: Getty Images/Hulton Archive

It’s only possible here to give you the merest glimpse of these creatures: their valour, their victories. I can never get enough of Rebecca West, who saw, early on, her fellow critics for exactly what they were (“There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation… a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger”). Her struggle to hide her emotional anxieties behind her intellectual confidence always moves me. McCarthy strikes me again and again as someone whose supposedly difficult nature is just another part of her great appeal. Her impertinence, if that’s the word, on the page – “There are but two qualities [these books] share, and the first is a splendid, sickening mediocrity” – makes me feel slightly giddy, even now. And her long, collaborative friendship with the far more serious Arendt speaks volumes. Ephron, author of what is surely one of the most splendid books about the end of a marriage ever written, is as cheering as new shoes, although she’ll be with you far longer. From Malcolm, we learn once more that if you keep quiet and let a certain kind of man talk on long enough, he’ll quietly hand you the rope, and likely tie the knot to boot. “Writers are always selling somebody out,” said Didion famously, a line I would like to have printed on a T-shirt.

Dean’s book is far from perfect. She skims where she should dive; her tone is unvarying, with the somewhat dispiriting result that her essays are considerably less distinctive than the women they portray. (If you really want to read about Sontag over a short distance, I would refer you instead to Terry Castle’s brilliant essay about her, collected in The Professor and Other Writings.) Above all, I’m resistant to the way she struggles with what she clearly regards as her subjects’ disappointing attitude to feminism. It’s not only, as she notes herself, a question of historical context. Like so many others right now, she seems to have forgotten that, even five years ago, you would have been hard pressed to get many, if not most, women in the public eye to call themselves feminists. Nevertheless, this is a great and worthy project: a primer for those for whom these names are new; a sustaining reminder for those already familiar with them. You put it down feeling steadier, more determined. Sharp women everywhere, I tell you: be pointy and proud.

• Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean is published by Fleet (£20). 

THE GUARDIAN