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Susan Sontag

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Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) was a well-known American essayist, novelist, intellectual, and activist.

Contents

Life

Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, the daughter of Jewish-American parents Jack Rosenblatt and his wife, the former Mildred Jacobsen. After Jack, a fur trader, died in China of tuberculosis when she was five years old, Susan's mother married Nathan Sontag, and Susan and her sister Judith took their stepfather's surname.

Sontag grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and attended high school in Los Angeles. She skipped three grades and graduated from high school at 15. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the College of the University of Chicago and did graduate work in philosophy, literature, and theology at Harvard and St Anne's College, Oxford.

At the age of 17 Sontag married Philip Rieff, following a ten-day courtship. The couple had a son, David Rieff, who later became his mother's editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and, subsequently, a writer. Sontag and Rieff were married for eight years and divorced in 1958.

The publication of Against Interpretation (1966), accompanied by a striking book jacket photo, helped establish Sontag's reputation as "the Dark Lady of New York literature." No account of her hold on her generation can omit the power of her physical presence on a room full of New York literati: movie stars like Woody Allen, philosophers like Arthur Danto, and politicians like Mayor John Lindsay vied to know her. In the movie "Bull Durham," her work was used as a touchstone of sexual savoir-faire. (See below.)

She avoided, in her prime, all pigeon holes. Like Jane Fonda, she went to Hanoi, but wrote of the experience with distaste, forecasting her famous rebuke of Eastern European Communist countries ("socialism with a human face," they were styling themselves) as "fascism with a human face."

Sontag died on December 28, 2004, aged 71, from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome evolving into acute myelogenous leukemia. The MDS was likely a result of the chemotherapy and radiation treatment she received three decades earlier when she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer and a rare form of uterine cancer. She is buried in Montparnasse cemetery, in Paris, France.

Work

Sontag's literary career began and ended with works of fiction. At age 30, she published an experimental novel called The Benefactor (1963), following it four years later with Death Kit (1967). Despite a relatively small output in the genre, Sontag thought of herself principally as a novelist and writer of fiction. Her short story "The Way We Live Now" was published to great acclaim on November 26, 1986 in The New Yorker. Written in an experimental narrative style, it remains a key text on the AIDS epidemic. She achieved late popular success with The Volcano Lover (1992), and at age 67 published her final novel In America (2000).

It was as an essayist, however, that Sontag gained early and enduring fame and notoriety. Sontag wrote frequently about the intersection of high and low art. Her celebrated 1964 essay "Notes on "Camp"" examined an alternative sensibility to seriousness and comedy, gesturing to the "so bad it's good" concept in popular culture for the first time. She championed European writers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and W. G. Sebald, along with some Americans such as Maria Irene Fornes. Over the course of several decades she would turn her attention to novels, film and photography. In several books, she wrote about cultural attitudes toward illness. Her final nonfiction work Regarding The Pain of Others re-examined art and photography from a moral standpoint, speaking of how the media affects culture's views of conflict.

Activism

The former Sarajevo newspaper building. Sontag lived in Sarajevo for months during the siege, directing a production of "Waiting for Godot" in a candlelit Sarajevo theatre.
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The former Sarajevo newspaper building. Sontag lived in Sarajevo for months during the siege, directing a production of "Waiting for Godot" in a candlelit Sarajevo theatre.

In 1989 Sontag was the President of PEN American Center, the main U.S. branch of the International PEN writer's organization, at the time that Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (in this instance a death sentence) against writer Salman Rushdie after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which was perceived as blasphemous by Islamic fundamentalists. Her uncompromising support of Rushdie was critical in rallying American writers to his cause.

A few years later, Sontag gained attention for directing Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot during the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo. Early in that conflict, Sontag referred to the Serbian invasion and massacre in Bosnia as the "Spanish Civil War of our time" and sparked controversy among U.S. leftists for openly advocating for U.S. and European military intervention. Sontag lived in Sarajevo for many months of the Sarajevo siege.

Controversies

Sontag drew fire for writing that "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." (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.) ([link]) Sontag later offered an ironic apology for the remark, saying it was insensitive to cancer victims.

Sontag was criticized in 1968 for visiting Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, during the Vietnam war.

Sontag sparked controversy for her remarks in The New Yorker (September 24, 2001) about the immediate aftermath of the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Sontag wrote:

"Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word "cowardly" is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): Whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday's slaughter, they were not cowards."[link]
Sontag was accused of plagiarizing parts of her 2000 novel In America from other works, including a novel by Willa Cather. She said the passages in her book were "echoes" of the other words and were used intentionally for literary effect.

Bisexuality

It is asserted that Sontag had committed relationships with photographer Annie Leibovitz, choreographer Lucinda Childs, writer Maria Irene Fornes, and other women.

In an interview in the Guardian (U.K.) in 2000 (see [link]) was quite open about her bisexuality:

"Shall I tell you about getting older?", she says, and she is laughing. "When you get older, 45 plus, men stop fancying you. Or put it another way, the men I fancy don't fancy me. I want a young man. I love beauty. So what's new?" She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. "No, hang on," she says. "Actually, it's nine. Five women, four men."
Many of Sontag's obituaries fail to mention her significant same-sex relationships, most notably with photographer Annie Leibovitz. This was widely reported in Andrew Sullivan's blog (see [link], [link], [link]) and the alternative press [link]. In response to this criticism, The New York Times' Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, defended the newspaper's obituary, stating that at the time of Sontag's death, a reporter could make no independent verification of her romantic relationship with Leibovitz (despite attempts to do so).

Some gay and lesbian authors have criticized Sontag — who had certainly never hesitated to challenge convention — for staying "in the closet."

Ms. Sontag was quoted by Editor-in-Chief Brendan Lemon of Out magazine as saying "I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the 'open secret'. I'm used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven't spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven't repressed something there to my detriment. … Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it's never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody's in drastic need. I'd rather give pleasure, or shake things up."

Works

Fiction

Nonfiction

Collections of essays

Sontag has also published nonfiction essays in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Granta, Partisan Review and London Review of Books

Monographs

Awards and honors

External links

General

Obituaries

 

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