Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser - September, 2019

Susan Sontag

January 16, 1933 - New York City

Notes on Camp- 1964

December 28, 2004 - New York City

Susan Sontag's essay Notes on Camp has an important to me only place in my reading life.  I was maybe 19 when I somehow read it, a freshman in college.  I had been an avid reader for maybe 12 years by then but I just saw things as one book at a time, I did not conceive of a giant set of interconnected works with a history.  I had not yet begun to in anyway classify books or see them as part of a larger world.  This was before the internet.  I was raised by very intelligent people who were concerned with the practicalities of making a living.  I had no guidance.  Maybe that was for the best but Notes on Camp changed that.  I saw very smart people were heavily into reading, treated it as almost a sacred activity.  I reread Notes on Camp once more yesterday.  I am far from agreeing with all her remarks but her sheer brilliance shines through.

In September of 2015 I read and posted on Why the World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser, a marvelous biography.  When I saw he had published a biography on Susan Sontag I added it to my Amazon wish list.  The original price was $19.95 but I lucked into a flash sale for $2.95 (it is back up to $19.95).

At 793 pages, this is a very comprehensive biography.  Sontag was most famous toward the end for being the personification of New York City public intellectual.  If you are interested in Sontag you will be fascinated by this biography as I was.  Those who are merely curious will have a hard time finishing.  To get the basic out of the way, she was raised by an alcoholic mother.  Moser spends a lot of time talking about how this combined with the mental issues of her mother, with several marriages, impacted Sontag.

Sontag was bisexual.  I lost count of all the romantic partners mentioned.  Most were in literature and the arts. She had an unsuccessful early marriage to a college professor which produced her only child, David.  It seems she preferred sex with women.  Her relationships were passionate though far from drama free.

Moser details all her books, novels, collections of essays, a work on her trip to Hanoi during the height of America's war there, which she deeply opposed.  She wrote a very influential book on photography and all sorts of articles for publications like Commentary, The Partisian Review, and The New York Review of Books.

Sontag seemed to be searching for security and love she did not receive as a child.  She was incredibly well read, heavily into one of my favourites, Joseph Roth.  Moser described a meeting she had with Thomas Mann, then living in Los Angeles.  Later in life she said she found all European literature in The Magic Mountain.  She loved science fiction movies, opera.  She would sometimes read twenty hours straight.  She did drink quite a bit and used the drugs popular in her circles.

I was fascinated by Sontag's
relationship with the very famous very rich photographer Annie Leibovitz.  Sontag was striking looking, Leibovitz, who Moser says had sex with many of her famous photo subjects, male and female.  She was quite rich and ended up supporting Sontag, spending millions on her.  Sontag abused her verbally in public in an almost sadistic fashion.

There is much more in this book.  To the curious general reader, you might get bored.  For me, it was a deep look at a woman I had long admired.

Mel u

"The Way We Live Now" by Susan Sontag

"The Way We Live Now" by Susan Sontag (1986, 24 pages)

I recently purchased a great collection of short stories all set in New York City, Wonderful Town:  New York Stories from the New Yorker.    There are stories by lots of new to be writers, some authors I have read before, and some I am familiar with but have not yet read.   Among the short stories in the collection is Susan Sontag's (1933 to 2004-USA) very well know short story about the start of the aids epidemic in the Gay community in New York City.   Sontag was born in New York City and is thought of as a New York City intellectual ready to challenge the establishment whenever it seemed like the thing to do to her.   She has written a few works of fiction, a well known book on photography, lots of diverse essays but I think she is best known and will mostly be remembered for her landmark essay "Notes on Camp" (1964).  I spoke a bit about "Notes on Camp" in my post on Alfred Jarry in which I pondered whether or not Ubo Roi should be classified as camp.   In addition too "Notes on Camp" which even though it is almost 50 years old now (yikes) still needs to be read by anyone trying to understand the artistic and literary sensibilities of the 20th and 21th century.  


"The Way We Live Now" opens with a successful New York City man finding out he has the "new disease", the word aids is never used in the story.   We do not learn what he does but we do know he goes to conferences in places like Helsinki.   There is a very elitist quality to this story.  One of the characters even says it is a shame this disease will strike down so many men would have the potential to make valuable contributions to the arts and sciences.    The lead character has lots of friends in the gay community.   Nobody really quite understands the disease yet but people keeping saying a cure has to be right around the corner.   There is debate over whether or not women can get it.    One of the characters says his biggest regret is he will no longer be able to have completely uninhibited sex.  One of the emotionally hardest aspects of the disease is that it can lay dormant for years so when it does become serious many people have no idea from whom they might have contracted it.   Sontag does a great job of letting us see the huge wave of fear that was over taking the New York City gay community.  The disease both built feelings of community through a joint fear and destroyed it as you might never know who might be a carrier.   


(Note on page lengths-my page lengths are estimates-I am reading a kindle edition so the page count may be higher than than in a print book-I do wish all kindle editions had page numbers in edition to percent completed.)


"The Way We Live Now" is a very well done story that lets us see first hand an important part of New York City history.   


Please share your experience with Susan Sontag?


Is "Notes on Camp" still important?


Was Sontag a bit of a poser and attention seeker given to theatrical remarks like "Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history".




Mel u
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