Susan Sontag: women, fame and loneliness

THEOn November 13, 2004, in Seattle, the medical team told her the terrible news: the marrow transplant, the last resort to stop myeloid leukemia, had not worked. “Do you mean I’m dying?” Susan Sontag shouted. She would not see the new year. One of her assistants tried to comfort her: “Perhaps it is better that I take advantage of this time to concentrate on her spiritual values.” And she: “I have no spiritual values.” The assistant tried again: “Maybe it’s better for me to take advantage of this time to spend time with her friends.” And she: “I have no friends.”

Neither statement was entirely true.The spiritual world was there. Crowded with names. Musicians, writers, philosophers, directors, screenwriters, arranged in compulsive lists, because they “protect from desperation”. Her friends were there. They read her books, listened to her, supported her. Her partner of twenty years, Annie Leibovitz, who paid for her care, was with her. But in the hospital dialogue there was all of Susan Sontag, born in 1933, author of epochal essays (Against interpretation, On photography, Illness as metaphor, Notes on Camp) and successful novels (The volcano lover And In America).

All his unsettling personality was there, combined with the idea of ​​not being able to leave without having finished the last article and ordered his son David to publish his diaries by removing the name of some lover. The diaries themselves, as well as confidential archive materials and hundreds of interviews, are the substance of the monumental, fictional biography by Benjamin Moser, Sontag. A life (Rizzoli), Pulitzer Prize 2020. Seven hundred revealing pages give voice to exes of all kinds, classmates, critics, writers, but above all to Annie, who for the first time agrees to talk about their story with astonishing sincerity. Susan bullied her. He called her “the stupidest person I would ever meet.” «She, this one here (and she pointed to her) doesn’t understand anything». In return she received adoration.

With Annie Leibovitz, an unbalanced relationship

Annie was a hugely successful photographer and he had earned a lot with Vanity Fair (his is the famous cover of Demi Moore naked and pregnant). They met in 1989 for the launch of the book AIDS and its metaphors. The casual intimacy that Leibovitz established with her subjects (she had slept with everyone from Mick Jagger to Bruce Springsteen) quickly became much more in Susan’s case. Sontag had told her: «You are good, but you could be even better». It was true. And she was born into a rather unbalanced relationship, with Annie submissive and even too generous. Drivers, private chefs, first class tickets, attendants, clothes, gifts – nothing was enough. «I loved Susan», he admits, «I considered her a great artist, and I was happy to do those things for her». Translated into dollars, “those things” were worth eight million.

Susan Sontag was always where things happened

Daughter of American Jews, born Rosemblatt, she became Sontag because, after her father’s death, the surname of her stepfather, who had not adopted her, seemed a little less Jewish to her (at school she had been attacked by the usual anti-Semitic bully), Susan was exceptionally intelligent, a little girl who was never a little girl. Bored by peers, graduated at 15, married at 17 to the sociologist Philip Rieff, graduated at 18mother of David at 19, divorced at 28, already in elementary school he was aiming for the Nobel (when, as an adult, she missed it, she was disappointed).

In any case, the Sibyl of Manhattan has established herself as the last great American literary star, the intellectual capable of dismissing Andy Warhol in a quip: «He was a horrible person. I certainly won’t go to his funeral.” He wanted fame and he got it. Along with a cameo in Zelig by Woody Allen and a parody of Saturday Night Live, the most watched satirical show on American TV where he appears with the unmistakable white quiff. An idea of ​​hers not of hers, but that she had liked.

At the age of 42 she had undergone breast cancer surgery (she would have had a second, and then a third, fatal one), a painful mastectomy followed by chemo. Her hair had turned white. The hairdresser Paul Brown, in Hawaii, where her mother lived, cut her hair and dyed it jet black, except for one lock. That casual styling would become the symbol of the New York intellectual.

The upcoming biopic

Despite her illness she was beautiful, and she had been beautiful. «Tall, olive skin, Picasso-style arched eyelids and relaxed lips, less curved than Mona Lisa’s» but equally enigmatic, will have the face of Kristen Stewart in Kirsten Johnson’s long-awaited biopic based on Moser’s work. And it is curious that she, against her interpretation, has to be embodied, “interpreted”, by another. He had decided to be where things happened. He was in Cuba at the beginning of the revolution, in Berlin when the Wall fell, in Hanoi under the bombings, during Vietnam, in Israel for the Yom Kippur war, in New York among artists who sought (without success, in many cases) to resist money and celebrity, in Sarajevo during the longest siege in modern history (1992), where he staged Waiting for Godot without electricitycandlelight.

He witnessed Freud’s changing fortunes, the birth of the new psychology, the casual use of drugs. He took speed, basically amphetamines (everyone used it, Sartre for philosophy and housewives to lose weight), he didn’t sleep, he worked 15 hours at a time producing feverish reflections on art, politics, feminism, homosexuality, illness, fame and style.

He loved men, but especially women

But, apart from the genesis of the works, dated or forgotten controversies such as the one with the feminist Camille Paglia, in Moser’s essay they are precisely the stories of love and friendship, the complicated relationship with the mother and the sonhomosexuality (admitted by Sontag through gritted teeth only in 2000), to give the idea of ​​her cultural universe.

She has been with interesting men: the publisher Roger Strauss, who will protect her for life after a short period of meetings that he called “margarita lunch”, the bisexual artist Jasper Johns who brutally dumped her by inviting her to a New Year’s party and leaving with another, the Soviet dissident poet Josif Brodsky, 1987 Nobel Prize winner, the very vain Warren Beatty (it lasted a month, in 1967). And Richard Goodwin, who worked for JFK, of whom he wrote: “The ugliest person I had sex with was the best in bed.” But neither relationship was truly deep.

Sontag passionately loved especially women: Harriet Sohmers, who opened the doors of intellectual circles to her, the Cuban-American Maria Irene Fornés who made her discover orgasm (“it’s not salvation but more, the birth of my self”), Eva Kollish, the teacher university who defined it as “wonderful, terrible, immoral”.

And Carlotta del Pezzo. “There are 400 lesbians in Europe” Susan told Harriet in the 1950s, underlining their minority and elitist character in the conservative post-war society. Carlotta, Duchess of Caianello, androgynous, drug addicted, indolent, was one of the 400and Sontag in 1969 allowed herself to be drawn into a turbulent love story, punctuated by mistreatment and destined to end as quickly as others. But what is most striking in the notebooks is the very harsh self-criticism, despite the celebrity, success and veneration.

And we understand the sense of loneliness, the loneliness of prime numbers, in fact, which in hospital caused her to declare: “I have no friends”. The critic Leon Wieseltier says: «She was like Marilyn Monroe, who didn’t have appointments on Saturday nights».

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