Just finished Benjamin Moser’s fascinating 800-page biography of Susan Sontag. It’s a warts and all job with very special emphasis on Sontag’s infamous lack of empathy and intolerance for anybody who didn’t meet her stratospherically high standards. That of course included most people. Her last substantial relationship was with the photographer Annie Leibovitz – a woman who had carved out a considerable niche for herself in the cultural world and who supported Sontag with extreme generosity in her latter years. Sontag was critical of Leibovitz’s failure to be as well-read as she was –and no one was as well read as Sontag. Observers described her relationship with Leibovitz as insulting and cruel. “You’re so dumb” she’d say to her. At one dinner party she was discussing Artaud (as you’d imagine she would be) and she turned to Leibovitz and said “Well, you wouldn’t understand who that is.”
Moser is also extremely critical of her failure to publicly acknowledge her sexuality. This became an issue during the AIDS crisis when the gay community were under fire. A prominent intellectual like Sontag jumping in to defend them would have been appreciated. However Sontag’s writing on the subject was kept at an intellectual distance and failed to mention that it was her own community that was being attacked. Although she slept with men and women, her sexual preference was always for women. She was very touchy on this subject and even when living with Leibovitz she always claimed to be bisexual. She was quoted as saying: “I don’t think same-sex relationships are valid. The parts don’t fit.” Her relationships with men all seemed to involve men who were intellectually powerful and from whose knowledge she could benefit. Her first husband was her college professor (she was only 17 when she met him) and she also had relationships with Joseph Brodsky and Jasper Johns.
Having failed to get an abortion agreed to by her husband she had one child – a son David. Although she clearly loved him, she treated him first with neglect (her social and intellectual life came first) and later as a literary rival.
Her finest hour was undoubtedly her sojourn in Sarajevo where she put herself in mortal danger and wrote her dispatches from within the besieged city. The book ends poignantly with her third bout of cancer. She refused to the very end to accept that the disease could beat her and did not go gently.
He non-fiction is what will survive of her although she desperately wanted to be seen as a novelist first and foremost. Her journals are also very interesting as they show the studied determination to improve herself and also the insecurities that were well hidden behind the omniscient public persona.
