"Sontag: Her Life and Work" by Benjamin Moser (published 2019)

Who is Susan Sontag? You may have heard her name before. The first time I heard her name was as an undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago while pursuing my Bachelor's Degree in Cultural Studies, probably around 2007. The class was assigned to read Notes on Camp . I'm not sure I understood then, as I'm not so sure I understand it now, but this is what fascinated me: that an intellectual, an intellectual woman, was writing about culture, specifically commercial culture in a completely unique way, opening up the realm of criticism to daily observance, witticism, and playful wisdom.

At that time, the big buzz around her may have died down, though I doubt it. This was the first time I truly engaged in academia beyond the high school classroom, and the only high school classrooms I cared about were Music, Biology and English. So I had no access to this world up until this point. What I'm getting at: Susan Sontag was never a celebrity to me, I did not have preconceived notions about her. So when Moser talks about Susan Rosenblatt versus Susan Sontag, or Susan Sontag versus "Susan Sontag" in his new biography Sontag: Her Life and Work, it was the first I heard of it. All I knew her as, up until this point, was a dense, sometimes manic critical thinker and writer, who seemed like a really cool feminist. Eight years after the class in which I was introduced to Sontag, I read Regarding the Pain of Others (published 2003, a year before her death) which touched me deeply. You can find my review here: https://feliciareviewsbooks.blogspot.com/2019/09/regarding-pain-of-others-by-susan.html

I jumped on the opportunity to access an Advanced Readers Copy of this biography for all the reasons stated above. It is now listed as my Staff Pick for the Chicago Public Library this month. My annotation:

*For readers of the late Sontag, Moser's biography will help place her well-known critical essays and novels, such as Illness As A Metaphor and Notes On Camp, in the light of her deeply fraught childhood and her struggles with identity. Two concerns, amidst a vast number of them, include the alcoholism of her mother and Sontag's acceptance of her homosexuality in a still largely conservative America. Moreover, Moser traces Sontag's life (spanning 1933 - 2004) as well as her ancestry by using historical documentation, most notably Sontag's actual diary entries, in which a paradoxical politics concerning the idea of authenticity reveals itself, as well as another major theme recurrent in Sontag's work: the division between mind and body. What might make this book stand out for many readers is quite surprising: Moser's grasp of the multi-faceted layers of Jewish culture and history in the U.S. and abroad and, more importantly, what Jewishness might mean for a political subject such as Susan Sontag. Quoting many of her most profound passages from publications, Moser explains how this important and canonical American writer rose to admirable fame the world over.*

According to Moser:

"There is no mastery without apprenticeship, no success without failure; and in literature, artists who arrive fully formed are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. Their lives would not, in any case, make for illuminating biographies: it is the mind's progression that gives a narrative to the writer's life. Failures do not diminish subsequent achievements but, by illustrating the difficulty of attaining them, magnify them instead." (276)

Sontag had many "failures". Her attempts at fiction writing (for example, Death Kit) were rejected by the public. Her relationships, both with men as well as women, failed on numerous occasions. Many times she found herself without any money and she had to ask for help. Her attempts at kicking the habit of smoking failed. Her attempts at being tactful with her closest friends and family failed. Her attempts at truly coming out as a lesbian failed. Her attempts at conforming to the etiquettes of bourgeoisie society failed. Sontag: Her Life and Work taps in to all of these supposed failures with clarity and sensitivity, helping us understand the mad genius mind of Susan Sontag through her life's work which includes speeches, essays, fiction, interviews, and more. Sontag's obsessions were with language, metaphor, and images... and Moser shows how she turned these obsessions into agents of progress in this comprehensive, detailed biography.

The unexamined life is not worth living, said Socrates. Susan Sontag might have added one more: to have lived without passion, you may as well not have lived at all. Remarking on Sontag's stay in war-torn Sarajevo during the latter part of her life, Moser notes:

"...Sontag was no longer forcing herself to look reality in the face. She was not simply denouncing the racism that had horrified her since she saw the pictures of the Nazi camps. She came to Sarajevo to prove her lifelong conviction that culture was worth dying for." (13)

It is striking to find out that Sarajevo was one of the places that Sontag thrived the most; physically, emotionally, and artistically, and that this very place was the seat of extreme violence, terror, murder, poverty - you could say the seat of hell. But she was energized by this. That her life was threatened did not phase her in this instance. Becoming a part of the community there, she offered solace and poignancy to the people through her production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot", using local actors and the barest theatrical supplies... all while the shells fell from the sky. And imagine, this in a place where people walked around with their feces in a bag, searching for another place to safely bury it, David Rieff (Sontag's son) reminds us.

That story in itself makes Susan Sontag a subject worthy of such a hefty biography. But it was not only her failures and these grand gestures of humanistic promotion that make her a star intellectual. Moser also writes about what she decided wasn't important, what she decided was not valuable to her persona, and how these issues influenced her to go on.

For one, there was a name change. She didn't use the name Susan Rosenblatt (her given name). She decided on Susan Sontag, from her stepfather's last name.  This disavowal of a cliche Jewish name says much about what she wanted to present as her identity. Another, almost surprising fact she had trouble disclosing was her homosexuality. Why was it such a big deal to expose herself as a lesbian especially in her democratic circles? Moser's examples in the text claim that she felt that it didn't and shouldn't matter whether or not she was gay, what should've mattered more was her work as it stood, not on personal choices and sexual preference. What this comes out as is, in her repression of the fact due to ingrained childhood ideologies is thus: it's no one's business...  I have been with both, who cares (my own interpretation) - not to mention flat out denial. The biography narrates her relationships with both men and women in excruciating detail, helping us understand the dynamic of the politics of these relationships. Many were mirrored after her relationship with her thorny mother.

In a darkly funny anecdote, we find that Sontag was even ashamed for taking naps. She didn't want anyone to know she slept, needed to sleep. She wanted to be awake all the time, even at the height of her battle with cancer, and would loudly deny that she had been sleeping to anyone who asked nonchalantly. She wanted to work 24/7, and did, for huge segments of her life, but that took its toll. Suffice it to say, Sontag's passion was not reserved for the public sphere. We learn about her passion to hide her different selves and identities as well:

"To a divided world, she brought a divided self." ( 708)

Through my reading of Sontag: Her Life and Work I learned what should already be common sense, yet never ever is: that even for the genius who stands above the crowd, there are things that bind us to a fundamental drama as persons, persona/s in this world.

In the first chapters of this bio, Moser breaks down the dynamics of her family life while growing up, explains how Sontag buried herself in books as a means to escape and to open up her world to something more meaningful. Then he goes headlong into Sontag's years at the University of Chicago, where she became part of the Common Core/Great Books program - a big undertaking by the university to ensure a classical, traditional education for all its students (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and so on). What is truly valuable about Moser's writing here (and follows through to the end) is that while his main job is elucidating Sontag's life, he does not skimp on any details of context at all: the fact that the University of Chicago was promoting this Great Books/Common Core ideology while Sontag attended, for example, heavily effected Sontag's belief systems later on. We learn about "The Family": a group of intellectual scholars promoting a certain mode of academic work (similar to something like the Frankfurt School as opposed to the Birmingham School). Moser makes sure to note these details in order to give us the bigger picture, and writes even deeper into the story for parts that turn into wonderful minutia while your reading (like how different people reacted to meeting or simply seeing Sontag around campus, and how Sontag was somewhat oblivious to these reactions).

Freud, Marcuse, Artaud. Benjamin, Adorno. Victor Hugo, Jack London, John Steinbeck. Sontag read all these during her coming-of-age years, like many, but she wowed her teachers and later, her professors with her knowledge of these writers and their works, knowing them inside and out, and furthermore with providing her own theories and opinions on their ideas. She moved into a point of radicalism as she fully entered adulthood - of deconstruction and heavy-handed, sharp criticism - that slowly, as she got treatment for her first diagnosis of cancer and finally snuffed it out - moved into practical liberalism:

"Her radicalism became passé, but her liberal activism formed one of her enduring legacies: an argument for culture as a bulwark against barbarism, for the connection between art and the political values that guaranteed individual dignity." (438)

As I mentioned at the beginning, from my very first reading of her work, Sontag seemed to be a bit manic in style, and I don't mean that in a negative way. Her writing seemed to jump off the page, as if her thoughts were overflowing into her hands and her hands couldn't carry the weight of it all, spilling the ideas onto paper in a flood. While reading Moser's biography, I got the sense that she lived this way too: acting on her reason-driven impulses, her thought-driven emotions, pushing her towards big actions, making sure that she not only examined what she herself was doing, but what others were doing, and by making sure to infuse everything with some unsourced passion that emanated from her very being.

After all this, should we be shocked that Sontag had major issues with hygiene? No. Should we be shocked that Sontag was a frightfully insane mother? No. Should we be shocked that Sontag was a very mean companion at times - enough to cause large displays of anger sufficient for a daytime talk show? No. Should we be surprised that Sontag had a severe drug problem for much of her life? No. Should we be shocked that she was accused of plagiarism, didn't care, and then argued that it was a purposeful literary technique? No. But we should understand these circumstances as resultant of a cognitive outpouring that had no means of stopping itself, and by God, we should be aware of what powerful literature has been produced because of it - it could not have been done in this instance in any other way.

From his admirable, impressive, and astounding research, Moser's two cents on her whole narrative life is priceless:

"One need not become another person, or to have had exactly the same experiences, in order to imagine that person's life - which is why the foundation of metaphor is empathy. Art and metaphor do not make people's experience identical. They make other people's experiences imaginable." (677)

Moser structures the biography by splitting it up into into four parts that narrate her life somewhat chronologically. Within each part are chapters whose names are based off of little quips and sayings from Sontag herself: i.e. "The Benevolent Dictatorship" (on the programs at the University of Chicago), "Quite Unseduced"(on fantasies regarding illness, specifically her cancer), and "This 'Susan Sontag' Thing" (on her fame).