Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  It is unclear how long the Rosenblatts were actually in China. They could not have lived there full-time. Tientsin is so far from New York that when Jack came back in 1924, the crossing from Shanghai to Seattle took sixteen days; the entire trip, nearly a month. Customs records find them entering New York nearly every year of their marriage, sometimes from beach destinations where they were presumably on vacation.15 It would have been difficult to travel to China even once a year. It was an exhausting trip, even for people in good health: hard on Jack, with his weak lungs; hard on Mildred, who purportedly made it twice while pregnant.

  But it was China that forever occupied Mildred’s imagination. The house in Great Neck, where Susan spent her earliest infancy, was stuffed with Chinese memorabilia. “In China the colonialists came to prefer Chinese culture to their own,” she wrote. “Their houses became little museums of Chinese art.”16 This interior decoration became another ambiguous heritage. “China was always everywhere in the house,” Judith wrote. “Mother’s way of putting down the present, reminders of her ‘glorious’ past.”17

  * * *

  Jack’s energy manifested itself in another area as well. Susan remembered a mistress,18 and Judith described him as “a playboy.”19 Perhaps this, too, reflected his tortured awareness that his time was short: determined, as his daughter Susan would be, to make the most of it. Did Mildred know? It is hard to imagine the girls could have learned from any other source. Did she mind? Sex, as her later career demonstrated, was not among her interests. Like many people who lose their parents in childhood, Mildred wanted to be taken care of; it is not a coincidence that the servants were what she remembered most fondly from China. And Jack Rosenblatt took good care of her.

  She was less interested in—or less capable of—taking care of others. Along with her elegant furniture, she imported from China parenting precepts that reinforced her natural inclination to keep children out of sight. “In China, children don’t break things,” she would say, approvingly. “In China, children don’t talk.”20 Chinese or not, these ideas reflected the mind-set of a woman who was by no account maternal, one who was not eager to exchange her adventurous life with her husband for the drudgery of child-rearing. “Our mother,” Judith said, “never really knew how to be a mother.”21

  When parenting became a chore, Mildred could simply sail away. “Somehow the myth has gotten out that it was relatives” who took care of the girls, Judith said, when Jack and Mildred were abroad. But “the relatives all had their own troubles.” And so, from a very young age, the girls were dumped on Long Island with their nanny Rose McNulty, a “freckled elephant” of Irish German extraction, and a black cook named Nellie. These women mothered Susan and Judith. But a child wants her mother, and though she rarely spoke of her publicly, Sontag’s journals reveal a fascination with Mildred.

  As a child, Susan saw her as a romantic heroine. “I copied things from Little Lord Fauntleroy,” she wrote, “which I read when I was 8 or 9, like calling her ‘Darling.’”22 Her letters read more like those of a concerned parent, or a passionate spouse, than those of a young daughter. “Darling,” she breathed when she was twenty-three, “pardon if I make this short because it’s late (3 am) + my eyes are watering a little. Be well + be careful + be everything. I’m mad about you + miss you.”23

  “She was clearly in love with her mother,” said Susan’s first girlfriend, Harriet Sohmers, who met Mildred around this time. “She was always criticizing her about how cruel she was, how selfish she was, how vain she was, but it was like a lover talking about a person that they were in love with.”24

  * * *

  Mildred’s vanity, her attention to hair and makeup and clothes, had a psychological counterpart, too: she prettified ugly realities so insistently that her daughter Judith described her as “the queen of denial.”25 Susan was often frustrated by her mother’s determination to skirt unpleasant topics, and one year, after calling her mother to congratulate her on her birthday, noted the following conversation:

  M: (re her recent colon biopsy—negative)—

  I: “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  M: “You know—I don’t like details.”26

  She only told her daughters she was going to remarry after the ceremony. She didn’t tell Susan when her grandfather died, saying only: “I don’t think he enjoyed the idea of becoming a great-grandfather.”27 (Susan was pregnant.) She didn’t tell Susan when her father died—and when she did, she lied about both the cause of his death and the site of his burial. (Decades later, when she tried to find his grave, she was thwarted by this misinformation.)

  Another example of not getting bogged down in details comes in a memoir Susan wrote as a young woman—the only dusting of fiction the slightly changed names.

  One evening when Ruth was three years old, her guests particularly enjoying themselves, and her husband much more pleasant than usual, Mrs. Nathanson felt the first labor pains for the birth of her second child. She had another drink. An hour later she walked into the kitchen where Mary, who was helping to serve, was working, and asked her to undo the hooks on the expensive maternity dress she was wearing. Laughter and the sound of breaking glass could be heard from the living room as Mrs. Nathanson fell to her knees and moaned.

  Don’t disturb anybody.

  Joan was born 2 hours later.

  Rather than seeing this as lying, Mildred saw omitting details as courtesy, tact: a consideration she extended to others and expected them to extend to her. “Lie to me, I’m weak,” Susan imagined her saying. She was, she insisted, too fragile for the truth, and believed that “honesty equaled cruelty.” Once, when Susan attacked Judith for speaking honestly to her mother, Mildred seconded the reproach: “Exactly,” she said.28

  “Susan spent a huge amount of her life trying to figure Mother out,” Judith believed.29 Susan saw how Mildred’s superficiality shaped her own personality: “Born to, growing up with M.—her absorption in the surface—I dived straight into the inner life.”30 But she did not see how Mildred’s superficiality had itself been shaped: how and why she had become “the queen of denial.”

  A quick glance at Mildred’s early life reveals a series of reversals that would have shaken a much stronger personality. She was just fourteen when Sarah Leah died of ptomaine poisoning. For the rest of her life, Mildred “very rarely” spoke of Sarah Leah, but her daughters suspected that the wound was deep. Judith remembered going with Mildred to see the “beautiful little cottage” in Boyle Heights where she lived before her mother’s death: Mildred sobbed upon finding it, and the neighborhood, ruined.

  Susan recalled a journey Mildred made from China across the Soviet Union, then under the reign of Stalin. She wanted to get off the train when it reached her mother’s birthplace. But in the 1930s the doors of the coaches reserved for foreigners were sealed.

  —The train stayed for several hours in the station.

  —Old women rapped on the icy windowpane, hoping to sell them tepid kvass and oranges.

  —M. wept.

  —She wanted to feel the ground of her mother’s faraway birthplace under her feet. Just once.

  —She wasn’t allowed to. (She would be arrested, she was warned, if she asked once more to step off the train for a minute.)

  —She wept.

  —She didn’t tell me that she wept, but I know she did. I see her.31

  * * *

  She had another reason to weep on that train. On October 19, 1938, at the German American Hospital in Tientsin, Jack Rosenblatt had succumbed to the disease that had stalked him for nearly half his life. Like Sarah Leah, he was thirty-three.

  Rather than sailing straight across the Pacific, Mildred concocted an almost perversely complex itinerary. Bundling a houseful of Chinese furniture onto a train, she plunged straight into Manchuria, the puppet state from which the Japanese were invading China, and crossed the Soviet Union and all of Europe before boarding a ship for New York. It was on this journey that she paid her only v
isit to her mother’s birthplace in eastern Poland.

  “She brought all this shit back with her,” said Judith. That luggage included the remains of Jack Rosenblatt, who was buried in Queens upon her return. In New York, Mildred seemed at an utter loss. “I tried to conceal my feelings when I came back from China,” she confessed under Susan’s questioning. “It was the way my father brought me up. Aunt Ann’s death—didn’t tell me.”32 Susan and Judith were not allowed to attend the funeral; it was months before Mildred got around to telling them that their father was dead. After she finally told Susan, she sent the first-grader out to play.33

  In Illness as Metaphor, Susan’s examination of the lies surrounding sickness, she quotes Kafka: “In discussing tuberculosis . . . everybody drops into a shy, evasive, glassy-eyed manner of speech.”34 The disease was, like cancer and later AIDS, a shameful one, and Mildred told Susan that her father had died of pneumonia.35 As Susan grew older, Mildred hardly rushed to fill in the “details,” and went to lengths to erase her husband’s memory. As a result, Susan knew almost nothing about Jack Rosenblatt: “I don’t know what his handwriting was like,” she wrote thirty years later. “Not even his signature.”36 In the 1970s, preparing to visit China for the first time, Susan jotted down some notes on her father. In them, a woman devoted to facts got his birthday wrong by more than a year.37

  * * *

  Mildred was thirty-two when Jack died. She was widowed, and returned to the life of the middle-class American housewife she had seemed determined to avoid. But she would never complain. Instead, for the next half century, she would present a lovely face to the world, stepping out of the room when things got awkward, medicating her sadness in secret, with vodka and pills. It is no wonder that China, where she had lived the great adventure of her life, would haunt her forever after.

  It haunted her daughter, too. Far more than France, with whose culture she would later be identified, China was the site of Susan’s earliest and most powerful geographic fantasies. China was a “landscape of jade, teak, bamboo, fried dog.”38 It was also the possibility of another origin, another life: “Is going to China like being born again?”39 China exercised a powerful fascination over Susan and Judith, who, though born in Manhattan, lied to impress their classmates: “I knew I was lying when I said at school that I was born there,” Susan wrote, “but being only a small portion of a lie so much bigger and more inclusive, mine was quite forgivable. Told in the service of the bigger lie, my lie became a kind of truth.”40

  She does not say what the bigger lie was. But her stories about China were her first fiction, one to which she returned again and again. In the early 1970s, during her abortive career as a filmmaker, she sketched a screenplay featuring a prosperous couple in the British Concession in Tientsin. The tubercular father “loves the game of making money,” though his “slum background” gives him a “sense of social inferiority.” The couple are fawned on by servants, and protected by barbed wire from a distasteful China where people pee in the streets. “Wife: crazy,” Susan writes of the mother. On the next page she asks: “What about Mildred (poor Mildred) nutty as a fruitcake?”41

  * * *

  What remained of that time, and of Jack Rosenblatt, was a couple of unwatchable film reels and the “set of Photograph” that showed Susan’s father alive. But she had nothing to help her imagine him dead. Without facts—a date, a cause of death, a funeral, a grave, or any visible sentiment—Susan “didn’t really believe” he was gone.42 “It seemed so unreal. I had no proof he was dead, for years I dreamed he turned up one day at the front door.” This fantasy evolved into the “theme of fake death” she discovered in her own work, a recurrence of miracles and the “Jack-in-the-box haunting of one person by another.”43

  Can the word “Jack” be coincidental? This “unfinished pain”44 haunted her forever after, figuring repeatedly, her son wrote, “in the inwardly directed talk of her final days.”45

  Chapter 2

  The Master Lie

  In 1949, shortly after Susan entered the University of Chicago, she was chatting with a group of fellow freshmen in the dining hall. One, Martha Edelheit, mentioned that summer camp had saved her from “total insanity” while growing up. “Camp,” Susan replied, “was the worst thing that ever happened to me.” Martie went on to describe the progressive institution she attended in the Poconos, Camp Arrowhead: “That’s the camp I was sent to!” Susan exclaimed. “I ran away.”

  Martie was amazed to realize who was sitting across from her: the girl who ran away from Camp Arrowhead had been a myth of Martie’s childhood. At the time, Martie was seven and Susan six. “The whole camp was awakened in the middle of the night because this child was missing,” Martie recalled. State troopers were summoned. “It was terrifying.” Now, all those years later, that legendary girl had unexpectedly resurfaced. “She hated it,” Martie remembered. “She absolutely hated it. She didn’t want to be there. Nobody would listen to her.”

  This escape was a response to a pair of unbearable traumas: her father’s death—by the summer of 1939, had Mildred even told her?—and her longing for her absent mother. “I always tried to get her attention,” she said of her mother, “always did something to get her attention, to get her love.”1 Yet “her mother dumped her in this camp so that she could do whatever she needed to do,” Martie said.2

  For a recently widowed woman who had just crossed half the planet, the need for a break was understandable. But Mildred had been dumping Susan almost from the time she was born. The fear of abandonment—and its corollary, the urge to abandon those she feared were about to abandon her—became a hallmark of Susan’s personality.

  * * *

  Mildred had to adapt to sharply different circumstances. She had money. The Kung Chen Fur Corporation still threw off a monthly allowance of no less than five hundred dollars, the equivalent of over eight thousand dollars in 2018. But the business suffered in the hands of Jack’s younger brother Aaron, who had a reputation in the family for incompetence. The war, too, took its toll. After a few years, this income began to dry up.3

  Mildred was not destitute, but her husband’s death meant fewer possibilities for escape. She seemed constantly to be trying to find a new life, and was incessantly on the move. She sold the house in Great Neck and moved to Verona, New Jersey, where she briefly lived near her father, in Montclair—perhaps too near, since before long she decamped to Miami Beach, where she and her daughters spent the year of 1939–40. Not long after, she returned north, to Woodmere, Long Island. A year later, in 1941, she moved to Forest Hills, Queens, where she remained until heading across the continent, in 1943, to the desert resort of Tucson. She would stay in the West, where she had grown up, for the rest of her life.

  This itinerancy—which marked her daughter’s life, too—had a devastating chemical counterpart. While mourning her husband and trying to find a new life for herself, Mildred had succumbed to alcoholism. She never mentioned the problem to Susan or, it seems, to anyone else; careful as ever to maintain appearances, she would sip a tall glass of vodka over ice and ask visitors: “Would you like some water?”4 Unable to deal with the world, she spent much of her time supine in her bedroom, leaving household concerns, including her children, to Nellie and Rosie.

  “My profoundest experience is of indifference,” Susan wrote years later, “rather than contempt.”5 Indolent Mildred seems only to have sprung to life when there was a man around: “We had a lot of uncles,” Judith remembered.6 “We didn’t always know their names. . . . One was called ‘Unk.’”7 But when there was no man, one of Susan’s friends recalled, “the mother would literally take to her bed and say to Susan, ‘Oh my God, my precious, I couldn’t live through the day without you.’”8

  When an “uncle” was around, or when Mildred couldn’t be bothered, she shut off. “M. didn’t answer when I was a child,” Susan wrote in her journals. “The worst punishment—and the ultimate frustration. She was always ‘off’—even when she wasn’t angry
. (The drinking a symptom of this.) But I kept trying.”9

  * * *

  Mildred may not have known how to be a mother. But with her beauty and her devotion to appearances, she knew how to draw the eyes of men, and enlisted her daughters in the cause. She was delighted when people mistook her and Susan for sisters—welcoming Susan and Judith when they made her look younger, banishing them when they “dated” her.10

  While still very young, the precocious girl discovered how to make Mildred see her. “One of the things I felt pleased my mother was an erotic admiration,” Susan wrote. “She played at flirting with me, turning me on; I played at being turned on (and was turned on by her, too).”11 Whenever there was no “uncle” around, Susan played the role. “Don’t leave me,” Mildred would implore her. “You must hold my hand. I’m afraid of the dark. I need you here. My darling, my precious.”12 Her mother’s mother, she also became Mildred’s husband, forced to compete with the suitors swarming around the beautiful young widow. By flirting, she wrote, “I somehow triumphed over the boyfriends in the background, who claimed her time, if not her deep feeling (as she repeatedly told me). She was ‘feminine’ with me; I played the shy adoring boy with her. I was delicate; the boyfriends were gross. I was in love with her; I also played at being in love with her.”13 Whenever things went wrong with men, Mildred always had Susan.

  Her mother ascribed “magical powers” to her, Susan wrote, “with the understanding that if I withdrew them, she’d die.”14 She burdened the child with this terrible responsibility; but in another foreshadowing of Susan’s subsequent relationships, Mildred also wielded the threat of abandonment, shoving Susan aside when somebody more important came along. Susan lived “in constant terror that she would withdraw suddenly and arbitrarily.”15 From Mildred, Susan learned to kindle erotic admiration by periodically removing her attention.

  This was Susan’s “profoundest experience,” she said. It created a sadomasochistic dynamic that recurred throughout Susan’s life. In the house she grew up in, love was not given unconditionally. Instead, it was extended temporarily, only to be dropped at will: a winnerless game whose rules the girl learned far too well. Mildred’s “need” for Susan forced her daughter to protect herself. As much as she wanted her mother to need her, she also despised the “misery and weakness” Mildred showed, and when her behavior became unbearably pathetic, Susan had no choice but to step back.16 “When she needed me without my having tried to elicit anything from her,” Susan wrote, “I felt oppressed, tried to edge away, pretending I didn’t notice her appeal.”17