Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  This was a model for the intellectual she herself would come to represent. Philip held out the same promise, and that was why he enthralled minds that longed to be led—minds like Susan’s. “I could make you somebody,” one of his students imagined his saying. “Right now you’re dirt, but I can make you into an important human being. So if you are insecure, this very powerful, seemingly totally brilliant mind will lift you out of the gutter.”29 Throughout his life, he maintained this pontifical pose. “I never saw him accept somebody else, in any interaction, as an equal,” said a colleague at Penn. “But then I never saw him with, say, Isaiah Berlin.”30

  * * *

  At first, Susan was grateful for this superior influence. For someone who had no father and who “wasn’t ever really a child,” the temptation was irresistible. “It was as if they had utterly misconceived the nature of marriage—as if they had both understood it as a surrender of self,” she wrote in one memoir.31 The question of how much to surrender plagued her. Part of her wanted to hand over a self that had always been hard to bear; another part wanted to cling to a hard-won identity. In “Decisions,” one of the rare documents signed “Susan Rieff,” she reproduces a basic debate about the person she was to become.

  Philip, in this instance, allows her to decide whether to change her name: “That she should raise this problem, after taking his name in that embarrassing, impersonal filling-out-of-forms a week ago, now that she should want to reclaim her own name, there was something too distasteful and ambiguous about it,” she wrote. But problems loomed wherever she turned. “It occurs to me that if I keep my step-father’s name,” she tells Philip, “it’s only a sign of my subjection to him. That’s true for my real father’s name, too.” At last, she realizes that the decision is hers, that “he could not help her, no more than he could help her not to bear the child that she did not want.”32

  The arrival of that child would institutionalize a series of submissions. First was to the heterosexuality to which she had been such an ambivalent convert. Second was to the academic career she had so recently mocked but which now seemed the only outlet for her intellectual ambitions. “All her energies,” she wrote, “concentrated in an attempt to evade the role into which she felt herself to be locked—that of a wife and mother—without ceasing to be that. Only bourgeois solutions seemed possible.”33

  One of these bourgeois solutions was Philip himself. In an anecdote she often repeated, Susan described reading Middlemarch and realizing “not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon.”34 That symbol of finicky pedantry, however, disguises the real attractions Philip held for her. After a childhood starved of attention, of interest, she had found an intellectual partner at last. “We talked for seven years,” she wrote. They talked when one of them had to go to the bathroom; they talked all night in the car when, losing track of time, they forgot to go back up to their apartment.35

  Life with Philip did not mean a surrender of academic ambitions. Indeed, to some degree, he and his modest but respectable income would make them possible. He found a position at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. This was an institution founded four years before, in 1948, in part to address anti-Semitism in older universities. Brandeis was one of the flagships of postwar American Judaism, in which commitment to a secular Jewish identity went hand in hand with a commitment to a patriotic Americanism. It was a bid for integration and acceptance that attracted figures no less prominent than Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt, along with a faculty that was, from the very beginning, of the first rank: not a dismal prospect for Susan or Philip. And in and around Boston was a range of intellectual life far more exciting than in Madison or even Chicago.

  They moved to Arlington, near Cambridge, in September. Susan was in her last month of pregnancy, but a woman who later insisted that patients must demand as much information as possible from their doctors did not know what she was facing. She was, her son later wrote, “medically somewhat incurious.”36 This seems to be an understatement. Bizarrely, she never once consulted a doctor during her pregnancy, nor betrayed the slightest curiosity about what childbirth entailed.

  One night, “she was asleep in bed and woke up and said: Oh, I wet the bed,” she told a friend. “And then stood up out of the bed and there was this horrible pain. . . . She said, I just thought I had a stomachache and then I just kept peeing myself.” She woke Philip. When he explained that her water had broken, she had no idea what the phrase meant. When she reached the hospital and went into labor, “she couldn’t understand why it was so painful and that they wouldn’t help her out.”37

  Without a wealth of other evidence that, in her own words, “I have always liked to pretend my body isn’t there,” the notion that Susan Sontag did not know that childbirth was painful would seem too outlandish to be true. But the story is hers.

  * * *

  David Rosenblatt Rieff was born on September 28, 1952. His first name honored Michelangelo’s sculpture, an homage to beauty and perfectibility. It was also an imposition, on the infant, of the exacting standards to which his mother held herself. His middle name honored Susan’s dead father, but—reflecting his mother’s anguished debates about her own identity—he came to be known as David Sontag Rieff.

  In their first Photograph together, his mother looks utterly dazed, herself a child. She was nineteen and looked younger. For the first year of David’s life, Susan stayed home with him and Rosie McNulty, who looked after David as she had looked after Susan and Judith. “That’s one of the reasons David and I resemble each other so much,” Susan said years later. “We had the same mother.”38

  Eighteen months after his birth, Mildred Sontag finally bestirred herself to meet her grandson. “Oh, he’s charming,” she said. “And you know I don’t like children, Susan.”39

  Chapter 9

  The Moralist

  It is hard to imagine, today, a single figure who could exercise the enduring, magnetic attraction that Sigmund Freud held for at least three generations of intellectuals, artists, and scientists. His terrifying vision, laid out in volume after volume of seductive prose, offered a totalizing theory of personality and history that had not been attempted since Marx and Hegel, one that was embraced and resisted, debated and refined, in a way that made his the mind with which any thinker worthy of the name was forced to contend. He was the writer who, more than any other, reshaped the grammar of the world, rearranging the relation of subject to object.

  The subject and the object were the mind and the body. A medical doctor, a product of the positivist science that made so many sensational discoveries in the nineteenth century, Freud spent years seeking material explanations for the apparently inexplicable psychological symptoms with which he—a specialist in nervous disorders—was daily confronted. In his generation, he wrote in 1925, physicians and scientists were “brought up to respect only anatomical, physical and chemical factors.” And early on, he, too, believed that “the mental is based on the organic”—that the body was the seat of the mind. Accordingly, the physician “addressed himself only to the disease”—the physical—“as an alien which had somehow insinuated itself into the body of the patient.” The patient was a mere vessel, a “feudal lady,” “a spectator at the tournament for which he had engaged the physician as his champion.”1

  The Freudian revolution overturned the physiological approach to mental illness, eventually extending to most aspects of sickness—including, in one of Freud’s most polemical utterances, to death itself. “In the Freudian conception,” wrote one author, “as it gradually emerged through these early years of uncertainty, the body exists as a symptom of mental demands.”

  * * *

  The identity of that author is one of the enduring mysteries in the life of Susan Sontag. The book that contains it, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, was published in 1959 under the name of Philip Rieff. But ever after, the wife from whom he was by that point separated would claim to be its real au
thor. The book is so excellent in so many ways, so complete a working-out of the themes that marked Susan Sontag’s life, that it is hard to imagine it could be the product of a mind that later produced such meager fruits.

  In 1966, Rieff published a further book on Freud, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, but his later writings were few. After a short essay called Fellow Teachers appeared in 1973, more than three decades would pass before he wrote another book. His late writings did not enhance his early reputation. They return, in ponderous prose, to the same gloomy themes of civilizational Untergang that marked his work from the beginning. In his department at Penn, colleagues and students who saw past the presumptuous veneer that overlay his interactions with them came away with the impression that there was something unearned about his eminence. The slum kid who dressed like a British grandee had something of the scam artist about him. The “profoundly uncomfortable man” surely knew this himself.

  Yet the question about The Mind of the Moralist is not whether Philip Rieff was capable of producing it, or whether he contributed to it: the book seems to be based, at least to some degree, on his research and notes. But Susan’s very first account of their relationship was the letter to Judith in which she described her excitement at meeting him and the work she was doing ghostwriting his reviews, saving him “the trouble of reading the book.” Perhaps this procedure seemed normal in 1950; but even viewed in the most liberal light, it begs the question of why a twenty-seven-year-old not-yet-professor was hiring an undergraduate to review books he himself had not read.2

  There are contemporary witnesses to Susan’s authorship of The Mind of the Moralist. It began as Philip’s project. “He had a gazillion notes,” her friend Minda Rae Amiran said, “and he strove to put it together into a book.” Susan tried to help organize it, but “when it was completed, she saw that it was still a mess.” During their years in Cambridge, Amiran said, “Susan was spending every afternoon rewriting the whole thing from scratch.”3 Even more than every afternoon: in 1956, she wrote her mother that she was “in third gear now on the book—working about 10 hours a day on it at least.”4 In 1958, when he was trying to get her a job at Commentary, her friend Jacob Taubes warned her not to relinquish her authorship. “I told [the editor] you are an excellent ghostwriter. I wish I would not be bound by your confidence to what degree! Did you, by the way, relinquish all rights on the Freud? It would be a crime.”

  (“I see you in Cambridge typing on the bed.” He adds, with a wink: “What a waste of time and waste of the bed.”)5

  She later said that she worked in the bedroom so that their friends would not see her writing; in any case, she wrote Taubes, she had indeed relinquished her rights.6 “I am without consolation,” he answered. “You cannot give your intellectual contribution to another person. . . . It could be the ruin of Philip if he dared to come out shamelessly without your signature.”7

  Susan always regretted signing it over to him: “It was almost like a blood sacrifice,” said Taubes’s son Ethan. “That she was willing to give up the book to get rid of him.” Four decades later—long after the question ceased to matter to either of their careers—the doorbell rang at Susan’s apartment in New York. A package was delivered. She opened it to find a copy of The Mind of the Moralist. It was inscribed to “Susan, Love of my life, mother of my son, co-author of this book: forgive me. Please. Philip.”8

  * * *

  When, in 1966, Susan Sontag published the essays collected as Against Interpretation, many reviewers expressed amazement that an obscure young person, just thirty-three, had produced a work of such breadth and maturity. The book dazzles with an erudition that was impressive then and is impressive now, and that begs the question of how and where it was acquired.

  Their Francophile biases led many to assume that these essays had been produced in a café somewhere on the Left Bank. But the Parisian patina overlaid a far more substantial foundation that was the product of nearly a decade of monastic seclusion. From the time she moved to Wisconsin in 1951, when Joyce Farber saw her working on the book, to the time she reached Paris in 1958, where a friend saw her correcting the proofs,9 she worked on Freud. For the rest of her life, she would never work as long or as intensely on any subject. The Mind of the Moralist bears the marks of this concentration and this engagement, mapping out the terrain she would later explore in Against Interpretation and in her first novel, The Benefactor.

  Yet her subsequent writings rarely so much as breathe the name of Freud. Throughout her life, she would often write most revealingly about herself when she was writing about others, and the odd direct mentions of what she called “psychology” would usually be dismissive. The very title of Against Interpretation might well read Against Freud, since it is against his hermeneutic principles that she inveighs. To read Against Interpretation in the light of The Mind of the Moralist recalls the film she recommended to Judith, All About Eve, in which a younger upstart attaches herself to, and then destroys, an older master.

  Or, in the Freudian terms of the Oedipus complex: the child, in love with the mother, obsessed with the father, aspires to kill and replace him. For the fatherless Sontag, Freud proved as formidable a model of the father-philosopher as she would encounter in her life.

  * * *

  Respect for this great figure blinks from every page of The Mind of the Moralist. But as in the college paper in which Sontag challenged T. S. Eliot, respect does not equal unquestioning acceptance. In the areas of disagreement as well as of agreement, we see the young Sontag honing her philosophical skills, probing the work of an illustrious predecessor in order to discover an intellectual path of her own. The book was intended to “show the mind of Freud, not the man or the movement he founded, as it derives lessons on the right conduct of life from the misery of living it.”10 And it resists many of the ideas being derived from Freud in postwar America, including the idea that Freud was a figure of liberation. The book does acknowledge the liberating potential in his work, but emphasizes that—rather than resisting morality—Freud urged people to submit to it.

  Any writer as rich as Freud offers a thousand possible approaches, and the ones Sontag chose (surely, at least initially, in collaboration with Philip) give a foretaste of the questions she would pursue ever after. They emerged from her own difficult life, and at their heart was a pessimistic vision of personality and, by extension, of history: an intimation that illness and pain, psychic and physical, could be comprehended, but never entirely relieved.

  The book begins with an examination of the relation of physical to mental sickness. This is the subject with which she would contend far more aggressively in her writings on disease, whose power derives from the dreadful physical and emotional travails, never mentioned, that underlie their author’s highly intellectual approach. Many of those writings were a reaction against what she defines here as “Freud’s general thesis—sickness conceived of as historical.”11 But when she was young, this notion was especially attractive to someone who had already suffered a great deal of psychic pain.

  “Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences,” Freud wrote. The italics are his; they could have been hers.12 With or without Freud, her first approach to problems had always been through the mind, though Freud’s concept of memory extends far beyond the recollection of painful events in the history of the individual. He eventually expanded his view of “reminiscences” to traumas impressed upon mankind’s collective unconscious mind as far back as prehistory.

  The self is not simply “the body’s restive tenant,” she writes.

  For Freud the mind is not so much that which dwells inside the body, speaking metaphorically, as that which forms a sheath for the body. It is mind—by means of its basic unit, the “wish”—which first defines the body’s needs. The unconscious, or “primary system,” as Freud sometimes calls it, “is unable to do anything but wish.”13

  Freud’s reluctantly formed idea that the body is a precipitate of the mi
nd led him away from the positivist science of the nineteenth century. This revolutionary notion would not triumph permanently. The pendulum later swung back toward the very anatomical and chemical factors he had downplayed: today, diseases of the body are most commonly seen as they were in the nineteenth century, as chemical problems best treated with chemicals. This became Sontag’s own public standpoint—though it is a testament to her enduring Freudianism that, when she became sick herself, she would confess that she could never quite believe it.

  In Freud’s system, body and mind manifest themselves through language. The language of the body is disease; the language of the mind is language. Since almost all minds are diseased, language is symptomatic, too, pathological, betraying origins, history, and intentions through texts that reveal far more than the speaker consciously intends. The task of the psychoanalyst was to divine truth from “the rubbish-heap . . . of our observations.”14 The rubbish heap was made up of slips of the tongue, jokes, forgettings, and mistakes. But the most important evidence was the dream, which bore messages from the unconscious that were strange, but—Freud discovered—eminently decipherable.

  The dream was not only real. As an emissary from the unconscious, it was far more real than the visible “reality” of personality. Dreams are not in conflict with reality. They are facts uttered by the unconscious; and the analyst, in order to understand this more profound reality, had to see through the symbols in which that truth was cloaked. Nothing was what it seemed; everything was a symbol of something else; and the interpretation of dreams became the cornerstone of the Freudian method, whose literature necessarily had a highly metaphorical cast. “The task of the Freudian science remains a kind of literary criticism,” Sontag wrote.15