Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

The Benefactor reveals an additional form of being a phony: being queer. Despite the dreamscapes, despite the novelistic dressing, the book’s disdain for homosexuals takes a peculiar shape that reveals its author’s own opinions. If one can dismiss the stereotypes sprinkled throughout the book as products of another time, or as resulting from Sontag’s long-standing interest in gay subculture, that does not make them any less troublesome, or conspicuous.

  Gay people, the author insists, are fake, not real people but caricatures playing roles: “the homosexual parody.” Gay sex is not real but “the comedy of roles that is the homosexual encounter.” Homosexuality is phoniness, theater, a means of attracting attention: “It was true that he was frivolous, vain, disloyal, and homosexual,” she writes, for example, “principally out of loyalty to the style of exaggeration.”28

  Many of Sontag’s descriptions of homosexuals allude to this campy “style of exaggeration.” We see Jean-Jacques “chatting gaily about old furniture or the opera,” and “the waiting, gossiping sisterhood of men, the peroxided and beringed friends.”29 The effeminate, bitchy queen was not only a cliché. Similar descriptions had a long history in books by gay writers: some of these phrases could have been taken straight from Nightwood. Yet their cumulative effect emphasizes, once again, that homosexuality is not a lived experience or a bodily reality but a matter of aesthetics. And no matter how much she would have wished it to be otherwise, Sontag knew this was untrue.

  At the same time, these references are above all literary, no worse than the allusions to Jean Genet in her references to homosexual criminals. But another reference raises darker questions. “Homosexuality, you see, is a kind of playfulness with masks,” she has Jean-Jacques explain.30 This, and the passage that contains it, is an allusion to Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, translated in 1958. It is the story of how a young gay protagonist creates a false personality—a mask—in order to defend himself in the world.

  But the book is not only a description of a situation with which Sontag could identify personally. Politically speaking, allusion to Mishima was a different matter than allusion to Genet, who had been involved in the French Resistance and supported left-wing causes all his life. Mishima was a fanatic reactionary whose worship of violence would end, in 1970, in an act of hara-kiri committed in full public view. Like the writings of Céline and Heidegger—like the films of Leni Riefenstahl—his books belong to that group of works whose artistic value is impossible to untangle from their creators’ sympathies for fascism.

  Yet it is this connection that Sontag chooses to emphasize in The Benefactor. Not only does she allude to Mishima through Jean-Jacques. She also—in case the allusion had been missed—makes Jean-Jacques, her spokesman for homosexuality, into a willing collaborator of the Nazis and the lover of an SS colonel. This may be a reference to Genet’s novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, involving the French lover of a German soldier who is killed by the Resistance, and whose flesh is eaten by him in homage. But perhaps even more than the constantly recurring violence against women, the implied equation of homosexuality with fascism is the most disturbing aspect of The Benefactor—and one that will recur.

  * * *

  Yet this is not the reason that The Benefactor has often been summoned to the stand as a hostile witness against its author. The charge—that Sontag was an excellent essayist but a bad writer of fiction—eventually became a platitude. But the frequency with which the accusation is heard, as well as the obvious delight with which it is uttered, reflects a need to cut Sontag down to size: to humble a person who seemed so intimidating. It is, moreover, twice wrong. Sontag wrote some excellent fiction, and she wrote some awful essays. Her successes were inextricable from her failures, both products of a mind in constant flux.

  It is worthwhile to read The Benefactor in the context of its time and of its author’s evolving thought. This is not to say that The Benefactor is easy reading; its author has deliberately declined to be entertaining, and it is rare to hear positive impressions of it today. But when it was published, in 1963, people as different as Joseph Cornell, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida admired it. And in the artistic context of the sixties, as well as in the context of Susan’s own experiences as she entered her thirties, it shows a whole stratigraphy of emerging ideas. It is part response to Sigmund Freud; part response to María Irene Fornés, to whom it is dedicated; part Kaprowian happening; part surrealist film; part gnostic allegory. The difficulties readers encounter reflect real shortcomings. But they also reflect the radically different cultural context in which it was produced. In an age when Freud himself is hardly read, and few nonspecialists know much about Allan Kaprow or have ever sat through Last Year at Marienbad, The Benefactor is a relic of an age in which the novel, a later critic, Mark Greif, wrote, was “a vault of cultural knowledge, a tool for culturing people, and a work of art rather than an entertainment.”31

  Chapter 14

  All Joy or All Rage

  Much of Sontag’s interest in modern art was in the way it placed at its center the hidden world of dreams. Her definition of camp was “seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.” This—at least partially, at least early on—describes her own way of seeing the world: “The world is, ultimately, an aesthetic phenomenon,” as she wrote in “On Style.”

  To see the world as an aesthetic phenomenon is to exclude the impact of politics, ideology, human action—and human evil—upon it. And Sontag’s indifference to politics, as a young writer, is particularly striking in relation to her immersion in it later. For Sontag at Oxford, as Bernard Donoughue observed, politics was a matter of personal liberation. In France, she never mentioned that the country nearly plunged into civil war over the Algeria question. In America, not even the most violent upheavals—the assassination of President Kennedy, for example—were mentioned in her journals. When she and Irene spent the summer of 1960 in Cuba, she noted

  Cuban bad taste in women’s clothes, modern furniture, etc.

  Clean tile floor even in bohíos [shacks]. No one uses a rug or carpet in Cuba

  Cubans don’t drink, not even the bums or clochards who sleep on the streets. Never see a drunk.

  the total absence of servility or consciousness of race in Cuban Negroes

  the walk of Cuban women, breasts forward, buttocks thrust back (to hide their cunts)

  Cubans don’t read—children only starting to read comics

  piropos [catcalling] on the street—hardly any now since Fidel criticized them in a TV speech—said not everyone is a poet1

  One wonders how she knew Afro-Cubans had no consciousness of race; but what is most remarkable is that her experience was exclusively aesthetic. Amid one of the most consequential revolutions of the twentieth century, she notices the lack of carpets, and only mentions Fidel Castro in connection with his views on poetry.

  * * *

  Among the esoteric influences on The Benefactor, the most important, Sontag said, was Jacob Taubes and the history of gnosticism.2 Taubes appears as Professor Bulgaraux, a scholar of a gnostic sect of which he is also—rumor has it—an adherent. Though separated, the Taubeses remained important in Sontag’s life. Jacob ended up at Columbia, where, after a year spent teaching at Sarah Lawrence and City College, Susan Sontag joined him as instructor in religion. They taught together, and the minutes of their classes survive: “Prof. Taubes showed that Marcuse joins the critique of modernity opened up by Rousseau and Nietzsche,” read the notes from March 7, 1961.3

  Marcuse [Taubes said] feels that Freud, by insisting on the sexual in Eros, went beyond the Platonic-Christian premise of Western civilization, and therefore opened up the possibility of an erotic civilization—that is, one which does not live on the repression of the sexual in the Eros.

  Miss Sontag began by asking if Marcuse and [Norman O.] Brown aren’t using Freud for their own purposes while claiming to interpret his insights? Miss Sontag believed that they seem to be saying something quite different from what Freud said. . . . Freud ne
ver conceived of the possibility of an unrepressed society, a possibility which is at the core of Marcuse’s thought. Also Marcuse and Brown say that Freud misconceives sexuality itself. He had, they feel, a repressive view of sexuality—seeing it as man’s animal inheritance and a source of psychic weakness and vulnerability.

  Taubes suggests the liberating possibilities of the end of repression, a popularization of Freud that would make Marcuse a prophet of the sixties. Sontag is far more skeptical, a skepticism that may have less to do with Freud than with her own experience. Intellectual happiness is a real possibility. Sexual happiness is not.

  * * *

  From these years, Susan would retain a few close friends. One was Don Eric Levine, born in Manhattan of Russian émigré parents. He had trained as a classical pianist before enrolling at Columbia, where he took the courses Susan and Jacob taught in mysticism and religion, and worked as Susan Taubes’s assistant as curator of the Columbia Religion Collection. Eventually, he became a professor of English and film studies at the University of Massachusetts, dividing his time between Amherst and Susan’s various addresses in New York. He would live with her on and off for eight years, helping her edit her second novel, Death Kit, the essays that became On Photography, and the landmark anthology of Antonin Artaud that she published in 1976.

  Another was Frederic Tuten, a young writer who met Susan the week she published The Benefactor. He had just read a review of the book and was invited by the photographer Peter Hujar and Hujar’s boyfriend, Paul Thek, to lunch with her; a week later, they went together to see a new Godard film, Le mépris, and then to a downtown dance hall. “It was the time of the twist, and I didn’t dance. I felt awkward about it and watching everyone dance and then Susan, she gets up and starts dancing the twist.” They would remain friends for the rest of their lives, and Susan would often help him. He remembered her “absolute generosity” toward those she believed in: “I don’t know anyone today in New York, any writer, painter, poet, anyone who comes near—forget equal—near her generosity to other writers and artists and poets and painters.”4

  Another was Stephen Koch, who had entered the University of Minnesota in the same class as Bob Dylan and then, dreaming of becoming a writer, came to New York. After completing his undergraduate degree at City College, he reluctantly enrolled in grad school at Columbia and began writing essays. One was on two recent literary novels, Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Susan Sontag’s The Benefactor. He preferred V., but found The Benefactor congenial, and said so in the pages of the Antioch Review: the first thing he had ever published. He had the “bright idea” to send his essay to the authors. The one he sent to Pynchon was returned by his agent unopened: “Mr. Pynchon does not receive mail.” The one he sent to Sontag, however, received a warm answer from the author, saying that it was more interesting than most reviews of her novel, and ending with the sentence: “We should meet.”

  He had seen her around Columbia: “radiantly beautiful and charismatic, walking across the campus surrounded by an all-male pack of graduate students and junior faculty. I eavesdropped; I seem to recall her saying to her assembled worshippers, ‘I wrote the book as a catharsis.’” They finally met at the New Moon Inn, a Chinese restaurant on Broadway, where Stephen tried to impress her by ordering something esoteric.

  She spoke about Roland Barthes, of whom I had never before heard. (In any case, the first time I went to her apartment on Washington Place, she pressed into my hands Barthes’s Essais critiques and told me that it was essential that I read the book.) And we agreed to meet again, after she had read my essays. We did that, and she was impressed. I do not remember any real discussion of their content, but she announced that I should meet some literary editors and that she was going to take me around to meet them. . . . And so I was launched, Susan’s protégé.5

  * * *

  The year Sontag began teaching at Columbia was the first year Jews were admitted without quotas. Because of the backlash, it was also the last. In a city with the largest, richest, and most influential Jewish community in the world, bastions of gentile privilege survived. Many law firms and banks, fancy clubs and elegant apartment buildings, were either entirely off-limits or admitted Jews only as tokens. This was true, too, at the city’s most prestigious university, where even Jewish scholars of international reputation were placed in decidedly secondary positions. When Lionel Trilling became the first Jew appointed to a professorship in English, his appointment was controversial, since he could not possibly understand English literature as well as a “rooted” Anglo-Saxon.6

  The class of 1964, whose college years coincide exactly with Sontag’s at Columbia, was admitted on the basis of merit and grades alone. “Suddenly there was this freshman class that was like sixty-five percent Jewish from New York,” said the writer Phillip Lopate, who, like Levine, Koch, and Tuten, met Sontag at this time. “It was a scandal.” For this meritocratic indiscretion, the director of admissions, David A. Dudley, was fired. After all, as the Columbia Spectator candidly explained, “it is no secret that many [alumni] have expressed dissatisfaction with the geographical and religious content of the Class of 1964.”

  The class would be known as “Dudley’s Folly.”7 The Jews Dudley admitted were far more like Lopate, or Philip Rieff, than Sontag. She came from sunny suburbs; they, from immigrant ghettos. She was at home in elite institutions; for them Columbia was exotic. “I remember the first time I ever even fathomed that there were Jews with money,” said Lopate.8 Edward Field, a poet who, like Lopate, hailed from working-class Brooklyn, met Sontag around this time and was astonished by her middle-class “sense of entitlement.” She would take taxis, something inconceivable in his world. “The lower-class people like me, you automatically think of the subway.”9 Admitted to Columbia a few years earlier, under a much lower quota, Norman Podhoretz, also from poor immigrant Brooklyn, never “anticipated how chic the idea of Jewishness was soon to become in America.”10

  These kids were dazzled by their first contact with high Anglo-Saxon New York. For those who aspired to traditional professions—law and medicine, engineering and science—their education allowed them access to the national elite. But if they aspired to the world of culture, they were also seeking entrance to a Jewish power structure in some ways more intimidating: the group known as the New York Intellectuals. These were the writers who had created what the young Randall Jarrell called the “Age of Criticism.”

  “Physical sciences apart,” Podhoretz wrote, “literary criticism was probably the most vital intellectual activity in America, and the most vital branch of literature itself.”11 In Making It, his 1967 succès de scandale, he popularized the nickname the Family. They, “by virtue of their tastes, ideas, and general concerns found themselves stuck with one another against the rest of the world whether they liked it or not (and most did not), preoccupied with one another to the point of obsession, and intense in their attachments and hostilities as only a family is capable of being.”12

  Their house organ was Partisan Review, the same magazine Susan discovered stashed behind the porn on Hollywood Boulevard. In that publication, aesthetic and political considerations were intertwined. Never seamlessly—but whether they liked it or not.

  * * *

  As the name suggested, the magazine’s origins were political. It was founded in 1934 by the John Reed Clubs, the youth movement named for the American Communist author of Ten Days That Shook the World. In that first year, its editors congratulated a woman departing for maternity leave on producing “a future citizen of Soviet America.”13 In 1937, Philip Rahv and William Phillips freed the magazine of this tutelage, swapping Stalin for Trotsky while keeping its leftist orientation.

  Rahv was born Fevel Greenberg in Ukraine; Phillips, born in East Harlem, was known until 1935 as Wallace Phelps, a name that was already a far cry from his family’s original name, Litvinsky, which his father had discarded. The new magazine allied with young writers, including non-Jews like Dwight Macdonald and Mary McC
arthy, who had reasons of their own for disaffection from the American mainstream.

  The Family was predominantly Jewish, yet even in the late 1930s, one of the hotly debated editorial issues was whether America should fight Hitler. Many believed that the best hope for revolutionary socialism was for the capitalist powers, including the United States, to perish in a final inferno. Phillips and Rahv supported the war. But in the Family there was a wide sense that if other countries were bad, so was America. Even after the war, when the Holocaust became common knowledge, many American leftists correctly pointed out that if Germany was responsible for the Holocaust, America had vaporized two entire cities with atomic bombs.

  Because of their marginal immigrant background, many of these Jewish writers felt estranged from America. And they found allies among other groups who felt similarly. These included southerners like Faulkner, who still felt an allegiance to a decaying, premodern society; as well as northern WASPs like Macdonald and Edmund Wilson, who sensed that the moneygrubbing new world had no room for them and their older values.

  Whatever their origins, the Family, above all, was “highbrow.” The term was created by an older member, Van Wyck Brooks, an Anglo-Dutch patrician who took the view that refinement of mind meant allegiance to certain transcendent values. In a country whose business was business, these were the opposite of the financial values they considered vulgar. They were the values that could not be bought: beauty and freedom, learning and art. What separated highbrow from lowbrow was not class or education or religion or race but a belief in certain permanent spiritual and political values, which the highbrow reflected and the lowbrow rejected.

  Culturally, the Family’s roots were traditional, exemplified by Hutchins’s University of Chicago: a great-books fustiness that made coexistence with modernism difficult, as it was even for Sontag. Politically, it was radical. Its rejection of the “middlebrow” or “philistine”—mindless patriotism, popular television, sleazy advertising—also meant a rejection of half-baked politics, which they understood to be the tepid meliorism of Franklin Roosevelt and his successors. For many Family members, the word “liberalism” conveyed trashy bestsellers, foot-stomping Broadway musicals, Time and the Reader’s Digest. With her portrait of a Los Angeles drowning in elevator music, this is the note Sontag sounded in “Pilgrimage.” This culture offered escapism, anesthesia, to a world that had so recently produced Hiroshima and Auschwitz.