Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  Sontag’s memories of Los Angeles were not all negative. Late in life, she complained to an assistant, himself from Los Angeles, about someone who had just come back to New York. “I’m just so sick of hearing their cliché complaints,” she said, reeling them off: “There’s no center. You need a car to get everywhere. There’s no culture.”5 Los Angeles in 1946 was nothing like the international metropolis it is today, but it was a vast improvement over a dirt road in Arizona. For a girl who had been reduced to reading the Modern Library in the back of a stationery store, it had more than enough of what Sue needed to take the next steps in her self-creation.

  * * *

  The Sontag family moved to 4540 Longridge Avenue in Sherman Oaks, at the base of the Santa Monica Mountains. From the studios just down the road, Sherman Oaks would soon popularize fast food and television and car culture, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, all over the world. It was pretty in the mildly anesthetized manner of Southern California, and seedy in the same way. Susan remembered “wrinkled condoms” scattered on the lawn of her high school,6 and a neighbor on Longridge Avenue remembered that, when he moved there, Sherman Oaks had the reputation of being “the wife-swapping capital of Los Angeles.”7

  At first blush, this did not seem to be a place with much to offer a bookish teenager. The house on Longridge Avenue had one important advantage, though: for the first time, she had a room of her own. “Now I could read for hours by flashlight after being sent to bed and told to turn off the light, not inside a tent of bedclothes but outside the covers.”8 That door let her escape; and around the time of the move, she read a book she remembered all her life, one that gave a taste of the arduous profession she was beginning to imagine for herself. It was Martin Eden, by Jack London, a Californian who had become one of the most successful writers in the world. Like Richard Halliburton, he was an adventurer; like Halliburton, he died young. Martin Eden is about the hardships of the writing life: a California rube who dreams of literature, Martin struggles valiantly against philistinism and incomprehension, and sees his efforts briefly rewarded—though his life, perhaps inevitably for such a romantic hero, ends in suicide. His isolation and dreaminess mirrored Sue’s own, and when she received her first rejection letter the experience was just as Jack London predicted. She was “not greatly disappointed,” she wrote. “Rather thrilled to have the note and the rejection slip, for I understood—thinking, always, of Martin Eden!—that these were (my first) emblems of being, becoming a writer.”9

  She was nagged by suspicions that Martin Eden was not the high art to which she aspired. Perhaps Jack London’s bestsellerdom bothered her: Jack London was the kind of author people read in Sherman Oaks. Three years after she first read Martin Eden, she noted it was “insignificant as art” and referred to London’s “vulgar panoramic flash-back device.” Nonetheless, the novel also meant her “real awakening to life,” she wrote.

  There is not an idea in Martin Eden about which I do not have a strong conviction, and many of my conceptions were formed under the direct stimulus of this novel—my atheism + the value I place on physical energy + its expression, creativity, sleep and death, and the possibility of happiness!

  The possibility of happiness, according to London, was that there was none. “For me, the ‘awakening’ book preached despair + defeat, and I have grown up literally never daring to expect happiness.”10

  * * *

  Skepticism about happiness was common enough in Sontag’s generation. Her friend Florence Malraux, two months younger than Susan, was the daughter of the French writer André Malraux and his Jewish wife, Clara. Florence’s childhood was overshadowed by the Nazi occupation of her country, circumstances in which “personal happiness was not an aspiration,” she said. “Everything was subordinated to the great causes.”11

  Susan’s own experience made her respond to authors who denounced injustice. The war had shocked her; Victor Hugo made a conscious socialist out of her; Jack London pushed her further. But it was her family that provided the emotional underpinning for that intellectual commitment: the feeling that led to her identification with Fantine or Martin Eden. Her missing father, her miserable mother, her feeling of being misunderstood, of “slumming, in my own life,”12 made it difficult for her even to conceive of happiness, because she simply had no experience of it. Her son wrote that “not having known how to be happier in the present” was one of the “great, besetting regrets of her life.”13

  To make matters worse, Susan’s personal situation could not have contrasted more strikingly with sunny Southern California. In the San Fernando Valley, where everything spoke the language of progress, unhappiness amounted to something like a moral failure. Susan’s misery at home and boredom at school placed her, willingly or not, in an adversarial position to her entire culture.

  She was not the first to feel this. The contrast between personal failure and the promise of the golden land is the great theme of California’s literature. It appears in the works of Jack London; it appears in Frank Norris’s The Octopus of 1901, about the clash between the railroads and the farmers they destroy; it appears in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, about the disappointments of Dust Bowl emigrants. It is the theme of the “hard-boiled” detective writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, whose novels are populated by recognizable California failures: washed-up actresses, strung-out lounge lizards.

  Darkness in the golden land: the theme also runs through science fiction. “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan’s essay of 1965, results from her intense interest in a genre often dismissed as kitsch. She watched hundreds of these films, set “in some ultra-normal middle class surroundings” like the California suburbs where many were filmed—boring places where a membrane of normality violently ruptures: “Suddenly, someone starts behaving strangely; or some innocent form of vegetation becomes monstrously enlarged and ambulatory.”14

  As in her earliest writings from Tucson, she pays careful attention to the language in which this horror is expressed.

  Lines like “Come quickly, there’s a monster in my bathtub,” “We must do something about this,” “Wait, Professor. There’s someone on the telephone,” “But that’s incredible,” and the old American stand-by, “I hope it works!” are hilarious in the context of picturesque and deafening holocaust. Yet the films also contain something that is painful and in deadly earnest.15

  That earnest concerns the fear, in the Atomic Age, of the “continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.”16 And another fear appears in this essay, one that explains some of her apparently incongruous interest in this form of popular culture. That is of the depiction of people like herself as freaks. “Being a clearly labeled species of intellectual, scientists in science fiction films are always liable to crack up or go off the deep end,” she writes. “Disinterested intellectual curiosity rarely appears in any form other than caricature, as a maniacal dementia that cuts one off from normal human relations.”17

  * * *

  In Los Angeles, she was finding normal human relations. In Tucson, she had not known how to react when another girl was friendly. Now, her passionate interests, which previously had only made her something of a freak, brought her friendship. Throughout her life, she often felt out of place and unhappy, but throughout her life she also found that delight in art brought friends. “The flip side of my discontent . . . was rapture. Rapture I couldn’t share” in her earliest years. It would be fed by her new city’s bookstores, record stores, and movie theaters: “Soon I was sipping at a thousand straws.”18

  From her friends, she was learning more than she was at school. The city’s musical life had produced high school students with “tastes elevated and made eccentrically rigorous by the distinct bias of high musical culture in Los Angeles in the nineteen-forties—there was chamber music, and then there was everything else.”19 It was an attitude that Susan, who always felt separate from those around her
, instantly adopted: despite her love for science fiction and comic books, her embrace of the arcane was a mark of much of her work. “We knew we were supposed to appreciate ugly music,” she later wrote, dutifully.20 Astonishingly, considering how little she must have seen, and how fanatical she later became, this duty made her despise opera: “She disdained opera,” her friend Merrill Rodin said. “It was like Tchaikovsky, romantic. It was more important to be moved by Bach or Beethoven or Stravinsky.”21

  This was insecurity expressed as snobbery, of course. But it was also, like the Modern Library lists, an attempt to gain bearings in the culture she aspired to understand. Nothing in her family or education had given her any orientation in that world, and such musical hierarchies were a toehold. Like her interest in literature, her interest in music was never merely intellectual. “One thing that was striking to me about her,” Merrill said, “was that she had the capacity to be tremendously moved.”

  She also had a tremendous capacity for work. In her notes on Martin Eden, she mentioned that she derived from that book her ideas on “sleep and death.” Like the autodidact Martin Eden, she slept as little as possible:

  The days were too short. There was so much he wanted to study. He cut his sleep down to five hours and found that he could get along upon it. He tried four hours and a half, and regretfully came back to five. He could joyfully have spent all his waking hours upon any one of his pursuits. It was with regret that he ceased from writing to study, that he ceased from study to go to the library, that he tore himself away from that chart-room of knowledge or from the magazines in the reading-room that were filled with the secrets of writers who succeeded in selling their wares.22

  Her equation of sleep with death would never change. Associating sleep with sloth, she tried to avoid it, and was often ashamed to reveal that she slept at all. Writing for the North Hollywood High paper, The Arcade, of which she was “Third Page Editor,” she declared that “Many hours of my life (mostly between 2 and 4 AM) have been spent just trying to think of a different way of starting the day than opening my eyes.”23

  Most high school students know the feeling. But what is remarkable is the time (“between 2 and 4 AM”) she is trying to nudge herself into consciousness: as if, without those extra hours, she could never possibly catch up.

  * * *

  The air of premature seriousness was already notable in high school. “She was so focused—even austere, if you can call a fifteen-year-old austere,” a classmate recalled. “Susan—no one ever called her Susie—was never frivolous. She had no time for small talk.”24

  Part of this was shyness. “She seemed like the kind of person who watched and observed—I am a camera—rather than engaged and participated,” said her friend Merrill Rodin. She was both taller and younger than her fellow students, making her seem “gangly and self-conscious and awkward to me, maybe sort of a social misfit,” Rodin said.25

  She later characterized her years at North Hollywood High as bleak and intellectually starved. Even during those years, she compared her surroundings, in a satirical article in The Arcade, to a fictional republic borrowed from the comic strip Li’l Abner: “There is a remarkable similarity between our citizens and the citizens of Lower Slobbovia,” she opined.26 In 1977, she summed up her education with a story that showed just how hard it was to “ward off the drivel”:

  In 11th grade English class we were given the Reader’s Digest and told to read it and be quiet. The teacher sat in front of the class and knitted. And I was reading European fiction and philosophy and hiding it behind my Reader’s Digest. I remember that once I was reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—I don’t know how I could have understood it at that age, but I was trying to understand it—and I got caught. So the teacher made me put the book away and go back to Reader’s Digest.27

  Her writings from the time remember many inspiring teachers (including English teachers) who engaged her in debates on music, literature, religion, and politics, at school and in their homes. Still, her journals reveal an adolescent so precocious that it is hard to imagine what school or teacher could have been good enough. “Basically, I believe Schopenhauer to be wrong,” she intoned at age fourteen. “In making this statement I am considering only the most elemental portion of his philosophy: the inevitable barrenness of existence.”28 She quoted Nietzsche—“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies”—only to cock a skeptical eyebrow: “It sounds good, anyway.”29 At fifteen, she bemoaned “the tragically literal Kollwitz.” And in a class paper from her senior year, she embraced Freud (“too well known to require comment”) with a loftiness that few high school seniors, then or now, could muster: “I can have no possible disagreement with this first chapter” of Civilization and Its Discontents, she writes. “In the succeeding seven, particularly in the last few, of this book, there are many points where I cannot follow Freud’s logic. However, I have found these first two chapters which deal with religion a most lucid setting-forth of a basic idea to which I most emphatically adhere.”30

  * * *

  Southern California was not Lower Slobbovia. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the sources for this style (“a most lucid setting-forth of a basic idea to which I most emphatically adhere”) must be sought somewhere outside North Hollywood High. Much of what she read with the flashlight in the room on Longridge Avenue had been found in the bookshops she discovered in Los Angeles, including the newsstand she remembered on the corner of Hollywood and Las Palmas, “with the porno in the front and the lit mags in the rear.”31

  Among these was Partisan Review, the organ of the highest reaches of the New York intelligentsia. Between its covers was a voice far removed from those one imagines at the barbecue on the patio. It was a voice that Susan, at first, did not grasp. She took an issue home and found the language “completely incomprehensible,” she told a friend. “But somehow she had the impression that the things these people were talking about were enormously significant for her, and she made up her mind to crack the code.”32

  The magazine symbolized everything to which she aspired. “My greatest dream,” she later said, “was to grow up and come to New York and write for Partisan Review and be read by 5,000 people.”33 Like her, it was culturally but not religiously Jewish; and like Jack London, politically socialist, despite the Communist origins its name betrayed. “A New York intellectual,” it was later said, “was one who wrote for, edited, or read Partisan Review.”34 In that world—where intellectuals were not exotic, not freaks—she might find a place.

  “Sue,” her stepfather told her, “if you read so much you’ll never find a husband.” Books, and magazines like Partisan Review, proved him wrong. “This idiot doesn’t know there are intelligent men out in the world. He thinks they’re all like him,” Sue remembered thinking. “Because isolated as I was, it never occurred to me that there weren’t lots of people like me out there, somewhere.”35

  Chapter 5

  The Color of Shame

  Out there, somewhere, in faraway Manhattan, a continent away from Sherman Oaks, was a world to which Susan might belong. But much closer by, in the hills rising just beyond Ventura Boulevard, was a constellation of other stars, if that is the word: some of the greatest cultural figures of the European diaspora, who had sought refuge from Hitler in the land of “lemon trees and beach boys and neo-Bauhaus architecture and fantasy hamburgers.” Here, under the bright blue skies of Southern California, lived Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann.1

  Susan encountered that world on December 28, 1949, when she and two friends “interrogated God”—that is, Thomas Mann—“this evening at six.”

  We sat, immobilized with awe, outside his house (1550 San Remo Drive) from 5:30 to 5:55, rehearsing. His wife, slight, grey face and hair, opened the door. He at the far end of the large living room on the couch, holding a large black dog by the collar, which we’d heard barking as w
e had approached. Beige suit, maroon tie, white shoes—feet together, knees apart—(Bashan!)—Very controlled, undistinguished face, exactly like his Photograph. He led us into his study (walls lined with book-cases, of course)—his speech is slow and precise, and his accent is much less prominent than I expected—“But—O tell us what the oracle said”—

  On The Magic Mountain:

  Was begun before 1914, and finished, after many interruptions, in 1934—

  “a pedagogical experiment”

  “allegorical”

  “like all German novels, it is an education novel”

  “I tried to make a summa of all the problems facing Europe before World War I”

  “It’s to ask questions, not to give solutions—that would be too presumptuous”2

  She was disappointed. “The author’s comments betray his book with their banality.” So did his diaries. On Monday, December 26, he wrote: “Clear weather.” On Tuesday, he complained of ear discharge and noted: “Weather still clear and mild.” On Thursday, he wrote: “Afternoon interview with three Chicago students about the Magic Mountain.” He then added: “Lots of mail, books, manuscripts.”3

  The encounter was so momentous for Susan that she immediately started to try to write about it. The effort would not culminate for nearly forty years, when, in 1987, she published “Pilgrimage,” a story about her adolescent encounter with the elderly “god in exile,” winner of the Nobel Prize, preeminent symbol of the dignity of German culture. “Pilgrimage” has come to stand for the whole precocious childhood of Susan Sontag, the girl from the provinces who, by dint of her admirations for her illustrious predecessors, eventually catapulted herself into their ranks. It is one of the few memoirs she wrote. Because it reveals an insecurity few suspected lurked behind the figure of Susan Sontag—by 1987, hardly less intimidating than Thomas Mann himself—it became one of her best-known pieces of writing.