Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  The tension between the reality of her life and the ways in which she represented it to others appeared in her attitude toward her sexuality. Her rediscovery of sexual happiness with Irene, the abandonment of the “maimed, incomplete, pre-orgiastic self,” had, she said, turned her from the hope of a self into a real self.

  Yet that postorgiastic sexual self was strictly cordoned off. In her warm letters to Judith, for example, she transformed Irene into Carlos:

  I’m doing nothing much, except going to work, making love, going to the movies, and playing chess. I don’t know how long this affair will continue—perhaps for years, it’s that sort of thing. I have absolutely ruled out any thought of marriage, and Carlos accepts that. But he may get fed up with our arrangement when David comes back. . . . I fear very much that then he will raise the question of marriage, and I am completely and unambivalently against it. If it comes to that, or breaking off with him, I will break off with him.

  I suppose this only shows that I am less in love with him than he is with me, which is true. But I am very much in love, and he is everything I need in a person now . . .3

  As the letter indicates, David was in California, where Judith lived, and Susan still had to worry about Philip. Perhaps Susan feared that an indiscreet word could unleash a custody suit. (Philip would, indeed, soon sue her over David.) Susan kept up the pretense with her sister, whom she rarely saw, for years, decades after custody of David was no longer an issue: Judith only found out that Susan loved women shortly before her death. “How stupid can you be,” she said in self-reproach—adding, in her own defense, that Susan always “talked my ear off” about her affairs with men.4

  She hid her sexuality from Judith and, mysteriously, hid Judith from even close friends. “For the first six years that I knew Susan,” said Don Eric Levine, who met her in the early sixties, “and, of those, three when I was living in the same house with her, I didn’t know she had a sister. She was simply never mentioned.” This, though they discussed their childhoods at length. “I have lots of stories, lots of internal movies in my head of Susan with her overbearing mother on her bed, and all of this, and I would have asked: ‘Where was this sister?’” Minda Rae Amiran, one of her closest friends from her years in Cambridge, “never knew she had a sister until much later”—though, she emphasized, “we talked about everything in the world.”

  This is not a gnostic vision of a divided world, or a Platonic reflection on the distance between object and metaphor, or a Freudian dream-interpretation: it is the compartmentalization Susan learned from Mildred. On the one hand, the vulnerable self. On the other, a performance of personality—a mask intended, as she wrote in 1959, to shield that vulnerability. (“My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.”) But the uneasiness she felt about that division, and the emotional expense it demanded, is reflected in the meticulously honest journals she preserved. She hoped, she wrote in 1968, “that someday someone I love who loves me will read my journals—+ feel even closer to me.”5

  She always believed, as Harriet told her, that she would have a great destiny. Even when she was fourteen, she rued her tendency to primp for future biographers: “If I could just stop writing for posterity for a minute and make sense!!!”6 In an essay from 1962, Sontag asked why writers’ journals are interesting, and part of her answer was that in the journal “we read the writer in the first person; we encounter the ego behind the masks of ego.” She must have known how extreme an example her own journals would furnish of the distance between the ego and its masks. But: “Is that what is always wanted, truth?” she asked in 1963. “The need for truth is not constant; no more than is the need for repose.”7 She would hide in public—revealing herself, in private, to that unknown reader.

  * * *

  At the beginning of the 1960s, Sontag was working on a novel, The Benefactor. Dissatisfied with the contemporary novel, she was intrigued by the new kinds of prose emerging from France under the name nouveau roman: an attempt to free the novel from traditional devices such as plot and character and capture the fragmented nature of modern experience. These novels would reflect “life among the ruins.”

  “It is time that the novel became what it is not, in England and America with rare and unrelated exceptions,” she wrote in 1963: “a form of art which people with serious and sophisticated taste in the other arts can take seriously.” In the age of Freud, the form was too solipsistic: “Some of us,” she confessed, “wish we were endowed with a good deal less of the excruciating psychological self-consciousness that is the burden of educated people in our time.”8

  This burden was the novel’s, too. She envisioned a new approach, one freed from the morbid introspection she called “psychology” while at the same time preserving the other heritage of Freud: the decipherment of dreams. The Benefactor would attempt to square the Freudian circle: all dream, no psychology. It is the story of Hippolyte, a young man from the provinces who arrives in the capital of an unnamed country (France). In the first few pages, Sontag sweeps aside a host of the psychological motives that drove earlier novels. Hippolyte is not interested in money; he is not interested in love; he is not interested in sex; he is not interested in politics; he is not interested in art. After publishing a philosophical article—the only thing he will write until, thirty years later, he begins composing this memoir—he is introduced to a circle of “virtuoso talkers” at the home of a rich foreign salonnière named Frau Anders.9 The name is a wink at Hannah Arendt, who had been married to the German philosopher Günther Anders. For Susan, Arendt, who wrote a blurb for the book, was an illustrious example of the kind of writer she wanted to be: a woman, but a writer first of all.

  Hippolyte has a homosexual friend, Jean-Jacques, a thief, prostitute, and writer based on Jean Genet.10 “I have staged my life to incorporate the energy that is usually diverted in dreaming,” Jean-Jacques says.

  My writing forces from me the dream-substance, prolongs it, plays with it. Then I replenish the substance in the show of the café, in the extravagances of the opera, in the comedy of roles which is the homosexual encounter.11

  Following this conversation, Hippolyte, who does not have a method, like writing, of wringing the dream-substance from himself, starts to dream increasingly elaborate dreams. They read like scripts for films by Buñuel, filled with images that seem plucked from the canvases of Dalí or Magritte.

  She said, “I don’t like your face. Give it to me. I’ll use it as a shoe.”

  I wasn’t alarmed by this, because she did not get up from her chair. I only said, “You can’t put a foot in a face.”

  “Why not?” she answered. “A shoe has eyeholes.”

  “And a tongue,” I added.

  “And a sole,” she said, standing up.

  Like many well-heeled analysands with too much time to devote to therapy, Hippolyte becomes obsessed with his dreams, which is to say: with himself. “Dreams are the onanism of the spirit,” he declares.12 He, however, disavows any such narcissistic motive. Indeed, he thinks only of others, and particularly of Frau Anders, whom he sells to an Arab. He is surprised “that a young Arab would desire an expensive middle-aged European woman, no matter how earnestly his dark flesh yearned to triumph over white.” The gesture, which he calls “perhaps, my only altruistic act,” makes him the benefactor of the title.13

  He engages occasionally with women, including Frau Anders, who returns from sexual slavery in the Levant to enter, temporarily, a nunnery; and whom Hippolyte, as ever for her own good, decides to murder by burning down her house with her inside. Alas, he fails. (This is an instance of what Sontag later called her “obsessive theme of fake death.”) “My dear,” she tut-tuts, “you’re no better as a murderer than as a white-slaver.”14 To avenge himself, he enters a sexless marriage with a meek and respectable woman.

  * * *

  The book has plenty of comic moments, particularly in its exotic dr
eamscapes. Lautréamont, in a line Sontag quoted in her essay on happenings, said that beauty was “the fortuitous encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”15 That is the beauty, and also the comedy, that marbles the dreams of Hippolyte.

  Like all Sontag’s work, The Benefactor is rich with one-liners, dense with aperçus. Its wit includes fairy-tale absurdities (the Levantine slave trader, for example) that remind one of Candide. So, too, can its “questing” plot, a common device of philosophical novels. Though by the end of the story Hippolyte professes to be “cleansed and purged of my dreams,” his quest—in sharp contrast to Candide’s—leads nowhere. It simply plays itself out.16 Whatever story the book may have, Sontag rigorously insists, is not the story. Anything we think we know we probably don’t. Hippolyte may be insane. He may as well not be insane. Sontag’s determination to create an unreliable narrator is so reliable that it becomes tedious: there is, after all, nothing here we relied on to begin with.

  Albert Camus—to whom Sontag would soon devote an essay—wrote a book of which, in some ways, The Benefactor is an echo. The narrator of The Stranger, Meursault, resembles Hippolyte. He fails to weep at his mother’s funeral. He is indifferent to a woman who loves him; he murders a man without remorse. But though that book is also a kind of fable, it is nonetheless so grounded in the real world, including in the political world, that its lack of emotional engagement is an effective illustration of the dehumanizing systems it seeks to indict. In the real world, Hippolyte, like Meursault, would be a sociopath. But because, in The Benefactor, the dreamworld is the only reality, we read the parables as unrelated to any actual situation. Sontag has so studiously reversed the normal order—in which waking experiences are held to be more important than those undergone in dreams—that the “real” world hardly matters at all. With the anchor of reality removed, we read the parables and are often amused by them. But we cannot, as in Camus’s work, participate in them. As Conrad wrote, “We live as we dream—alone.”

  The Freudian origins of Sontag’s reversal of dream and reality are obvious. It was he who placed the dream at the center of his view of the world—he who asserted its reality—he who offered a key to its interpretation. In The Benefactor, Sontag wrestles with the question of to what extent one might be “against interpretation.” If the Freudian view could lead to easily ridiculed exaggerations, his ideas about mind and body, language and object, dream and reality, disclosed truths far too disturbing to be waved away. Several ideas in The Mind of the Moralist announce the theoretical underpinnings of The Benefactor. “The Freudian interpreter tends to view plot with suspicion,” she wrote then. And: “Fantasy became psychologically real and therefore as legitimate an invitation to analytic exertion as any actual event.” She recalled “the likeness of dreamer to artist, as Freud suggested in The Interpretation of Dreams, where the dream work is analogized to the craft of the poet.” She noted that “art becomes, in [Freud’s] view, a public dream.”17

  Yet—more pronouncedly than in The Mind of the Moralist—Sontag is resisting Freud. Early in the book, Hippolyte organizes his dreams into neat, explicit categories: “I’m having a religious dream,” he announces, or: “I have had a sexual dream.”18 He is obsessed by interpretation, by the need to understand the hidden meaning of things, a need that risks driving him mad. “I did not wish to deny an obvious erotic sense to all the dreams,” he writes, carefully respectful of Freud, “abstract longings for union and penetration.”19 At the same time, he knows that this tendency is a bore—which is, not coincidentally, the way the reader experiences it. In the film he participates in, which gives rise to many interesting observations on the nature of photography, he grows frustrated and explodes at the director.

  Don’t exonerate him, I urged Larsen. Respect his choice and don’t try to turn evil into good. Let nothing be interpreted. No part of the modern sensibility is more tiresome than its eagerness to excuse and to have one thing always mean something else!20

  At the end of the quest, Hippolyte and Frau Anders both manage to leave their heads. “I’ve learned to love myself, Hippolyte,” she tells him. “I love my powdery smooth wrinkled flesh, my sagging breasts, my veined feet, the smell of my armpits.”21 Purged of his dreams, he, too, focuses exclusively on the physical, taking care of the dying poor. “The patients in this hospital, being destitute, really enjoy being ill,” he claims,22 and taking care of these rotting bodies gives him pleasure.

  This is the book’s happy ending: his dreams vanquished, he can return, undivided, to the warts of the real world.

  * * *

  Yet the refusal of the real world lends The Benefactor an ominous undertone even in a book that mainly takes place in the dreams of a man of questionable sanity. The book reveals the inability to see other people as real that Sontag struggled with throughout her life. As much as this question is intellectualized and abstracted in The Benefactor—and Sontag always abstracted and intellectualized precisely the things she cared about most—it had concrete manifestations. As she was writing it, she began to note certain characteristics in her journals.

  Alfred [Chester] says I’m extraordinarily tactless.—But it’s not that I’m unkind, or need to hurt people. In fact, I find it very hard to be unkind—to give hurt. (X) Rather, it’s that I’m dumb, insensitive. Harriet said it, Judith said it, now Alfred. Irene doesn’t say it because she doesn’t know how dumb I am; she thinks I know what I’m doing, but that I’m cruel.23

  This tactlessness included behavior that most people, it is safe to assume, would have understood was inappropriate. “She just did what she did when she wanted to do it,” said Don Levine. “Certainly in things that we might have second thoughts about—is it a good idea to sleep with your best friend’s husband [as she had with Jacob Taubes]. Those just weren’t issues with her. It was not, somehow, an issue.”24

  But she did notice her own insensitivity, at least around this time, and worried about it. In her diaries, she acknowledged a “cowardice, unknowingness in the face of my own feelings,” which caused her to “betray those I love verbally, to others when I refuse to express my feelings for them.”25 These betrayals were often related to sex:

  How many times have I told people that Pearl Kazin was a major girlfriend of Dylan Thomas? That Norman Mailer has orgies? That [F. O.] Matthiessen was queer? All public knowledge, to be sure, but who the hell am I to go advertising other people’s sexual habits? How many times have I reviled myself for that, which is only a little less offensive than my habit of name-dropping (how many times did I talk about Allen Ginsberg last year, while I was on Commentary?). And my habit of criticizing people if other people invite it. E.g., criticizing Jacob to Martin Greenberg, to Helen Lynd (more temperately, but because she set the tone), to Morton White years ago, etc.

  I have always betrayed people to each other. No wonder I’ve been so high-minded and scrupulous about how I use the word “friend”!26

  * * *

  At this time, Susan produced an astonishing document concerning “X, The Scourge.” As the single letter suggests, this scourge does not have a name. “Many things in the world have not been named,” she wrote in her essay on camp.

  One of these things was the idea of adult children of alcoholics. Susan did not connect X with the consequences of parental alcoholism, partly because the idea that such people had similar pathologies would not be popularized in psychotherapy for another twenty years. By then, in her journals, Sontag had identified almost every one of these characteristics. “I grew up trying both to see and not to see,” Sontag wrote elsewhere. “X, The Scourge” offers a magnificent example of her ability to see things and situations with uncanny accuracy—and of her inability to use this intellectual knowledge in a practical, emotional way.

  “X” is when you feel yourself an object, not a subject. When you want to please and impress people, either by saying what they want to hear, or by shocking them, or by boasting + namedropping, or by being very cool. . . .
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  The tendency to be indiscreet—either about oneself or about others (the two often go together, as in me)—is a classic symptom of X. . . .

  X is why I am a habitual liar. My lies are what I think the other person wants to hear. . . .

  People who have pride don’t awaken the X in us. They don’t beg. We can’t worry about hurting them. They rule themselves out of our little game from the beginning.

  Pride, the secret weapon against X. Pride, the X-cide.

  . . . Apart from analysis, mockery, etc., how do I really cure myself of X?

  I. says analysis is good. Since it was my mind that got me into this hole, I have to dig myself out by way of the mind.

  But the real result is a change of feeling. More precisely, a new relation between feelings and the mind.

  The source of X is: I don’t know my own feelings.

  I don’t know what my real feelings are, so I look to other people (the other person) to tell me. Then the other person tells me what he or she would like my feelings to be. This is ok with me, since I don’t know what my feelings are anyway, I like being agreeable, etc. . . .

  Isn’t the problem that I don’t know any of the degrees between a total enslavement to a responsibility and ostrich-like irresponsibility? All or nothing, what I’ve been so proud of in my love life!

  All the things that I despise in myself are X: being a moral coward, being a liar, being indiscreet about myself + others, being a phony, being passive.27

  This shakily possessed sense of existence—insecurity in her own judgment, inability to assess her own feelings—explains her need to cling to those feelings so ferociously: to construct, urgently, some solid self.

  * * *