Conventional wisdom tells us that very smart people are also very complex. This was certainly the case with Susan Sontag. Her ambition to be the smartest and the most avant-garde of them all was insatiable. Many Americans are told that intellectuals have nothing but contempt for the common people. This stereotype fit Sontag pretty well. In addition, she had little use for (or interest in ) American literature or thought and disdained the everyday tastes of most Americans. Her role models – Roland Barthes, early; later Joseph Brodsky – were echt Europeans, and one of the few American intellectuals she ever sounded even half interested in was Paul Goodman, whom she profiled in Under the Sign of Saturn (1980). In all her “Europeanness,” she could make Gore Vidal sound like Garrison Keillor.
As Philip Lopate observes in his refreshingly candid Notes on Sontag, her artistic and intellectual universe seesawed between a formalist and a humanist aesthetic and ethic (104). She fervently embraced the former in her early collections of essays, particularly Against Interpretation (1966). That book, plus Styles of Radical Will (1969), anticipated much of what would come to be called “the postmodern.” Fredric Jameson was distinctly ungenerous in his famous 1984 essay on postmodernism where he mentions Sontag only once in passing.
Yet Sontag's mind, taste or what she called in her best single piece of work, “Notes on Camp” (1964), her sensibility was anything but predictable. Though her indifference toward, bordering on disdain for, American culture is pretty evident, her son David Rieff notes in the Preface to Reborn that “probably her deepest assumption was that she could remake herself … if one had the will” (xii). Indeed, she seems to have thought that, for her, death was an option. How American must you be to believe in your own capacity for self-fashioning right up to and including your own death? Sontag also had contradictory tastes. Who would have thought that she would be dropping references to the Beatles and other pop cultural phenomena in Against Interpretation and that “Notes on Camp” would apotheosize, albeit ambivalently, a cast of mind that cultivated the bad in the name of the good? For all her attempts to be an avant-garde novelist in the French manner, Lopate judges The Volcano Lover (1992) to be her best work of fiction, in part because it explores characters in context, one of the signs of a realist–humanist mode of writing. Nor did one of her other great essays, “Fascinating Fascism” (1975), exonerate the avant-garde's culture of transgression from flirting with a quasi-fascist fascination with sex, death and power.
Her published diaries between 1947 and 1964 show Sontag obsessed with sex, the body, desire, the other – all the great French themes of recent times. These matters were, for her, primarily homosexual from early on, even though when she entered the University of Chicago in 1950, after a year at Berkeley, she quickly married a brilliant young sociologist, Phillip Rieff. In 1952 they had a child, David. But the agonies (and ecstasies) of desire seem to have been experienced mostly in reference to semi-indifferent women. Everyone, of course, feels vulnerable when their desire goes unrequited or abused. But Sontag's diaries record her obsession with desire, lust, power over her lovers, and their power over her to the point of tedium. (On these matters, Sontag is no more interesting than most of the rest of us.) That said, one of her most penetrating essays dealt with Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1967), one of late modernism's – and cinema's – greatest works about the vicissitudes of desire and power between two women. All this suggests that Sontag's published work is far more interesting and impressive than the source material which she wrote down and which is now recorded in Reborn.
Sontag was also convinced that her greatest weakness was what she referred to as “X”: “the desire to place myself under the other's protection. In advance payment for this protection, I offer my amiable helplessness” (313). Thus, at times, she can sound like a female version of the early Norman Mailer or Phillip Roth, who suffered from the fear that they were being too nice, afraid that they were pushovers and wimps. But she need not have worried. If Lopate and her diaries are to be trusted, she was propelled by a powerful engine of ambition and could be a monster of intellectual status-seeking and rudeness. Lopate, a somewhat younger contemporary of hers in the cinema scene in New York in the 1960s and an important writer in his own right, describes how Sontag would survey the room at a cocktail party or a reception to find the most famous or attractive or smartest people in the crowd and then head straight for them. Out in the provinces, she was not really a very good speaker or a gracious guest, because she was habitually guilty, claims Lopate, of “underestimating the intelligence of others” (192). That said, there are moments of honesty and interesting self-exploration in Reborn and it is even touching to find her making reading lists in preparation for her teaching. For all her easy jibes at academics, she depended on the scholarship of those academics to keep her going. Indeed, only Susan the academic grind could have created Sontag the intellectual diva.
Finally, her life and work remind us of Yeats's poignant observation about the difficulty of perfecting both the “life” and the “work.” Sontag and a whole generation of post-1960s intellectuals, particularly in Europe, spent much time and energy denying the reality of the subject, dismissing ethical concerns as bourgeois, and cultivating an aesthetic of transgression. The post-1970s Sontag, having bravely endured several bouts with cancer and become more intelligently political than earlier – made the transition back to a post-anti-humanist humanism. It turns out that ethics did make a difference, sensibility did not trump intellect, the transgressive was sometimes simply dangerous. Her son David, perhaps, best captures the pathos of Sontag's life in his Preface to Reborn: “What remains is pain and ambition” (xiii).
