Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  These demands do, at first glance, sound reasonable. But who was supposed to provide that apartment, that space for her thousands and thousands of books, that freedom from the teaching or editing or translating or lecturing or journalism to which most writers—those who have neither private incomes nor steadily selling backlists—are forced to resort? In 1962, she mentioned, among the ways she resembled her mother, “money—my idea (from M.) that it’s vulgar. The money comes from ‘somewhere.’”13

  “You’re a rich man,” she wrote Roger. “I’m not a rich woman. I don’t have any money. I don’t think you quite get it.”14 The attitude behind this statement helps explain why, though she would stay at FSG for the rest of her life, the rift was not fully healed by Roger’s offer of a then-sensational eight hundred thousand dollars for four books.

  * * *

  AIDS and Its Metaphors was not one of those four. It was published in early 1989, shortly before she signed the contract. The austere jacket had no author photo, but she needed new photos for publicity. Knowing that her friend Sharon DeLano was working with Annie Leibovitz at Vanity Fair, Susan asked Sharon if Annie might be willing to create the pictures she needed.15 Annie agreed, and the resulting image showed Susan at her desk, her hair swept back dramatically, gazing expectantly into the distance.

  As so often with Annie, “casual intimacy” led to another kind. She had unwittingly found a surefire way to seduce Susan: expressing enthusiasm for her little-loved Benefactor. For one who saw photographically, its succession of fantastic images appealed in a way that they did not always for literary people. Annie was dazzled by Susan. “I remember going out to dinner with her and just sweating through my clothes because I thought I couldn’t talk to her,” she said. “Some of it must have been I was just so flattered she was even interested in me at all.”16

  The dynamic was set on that first date. Only a couple of weeks after they met, Susan acquired her first assistant, a no-nonsense woman from West Texas named Karla Eoff, who would work for Susan for the next several years.

  One of the first calls I got was from Annie. Susan was supposed to be leaving for her book tour, and Annie said, “Have you got her itinerary? Will you send it over to the studio and let me put you in touch with my people who run the studio? How’s she traveling? Who’s handling that? I want to upgrade her to first class.”

  Karla found Susan characteristically coy. “She was really nice to Annie,” she said, “not in a terribly affectionate way, in the first few months. And then I had a come-to-Jesus moment with her.” Karla thought Susan was hiding the relationship because she was unsure whether she could trust her. “This is just my friend Annie,” Susan would say. “My friend Annie was over last night for a minute.” Karla ignored the remarks, but worried that Susan suspected Karla of homophobia. Finally, she mustered the courage to tell her new boss that there was no need to hide her relationship. At that, Susan exclaimed that Annie was just a friend.

  I said, “No, she’s not. The way she comes by, brings you flowers, touches you. She’s courting you.” “Do you really think so?” “Oh, come on.” She said, “I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been with women.”

  Karla said she always assumed Susan was a lesbian, but Susan said, “I don’t like that label. I’ve been with men, too.” After the conversation, Susan allowed herself to show more affection toward Annie when Karla was around—but only briefly, and only privately. In public, in fact, she would show Karla far more affection than she ever showed Annie: Karla was not gay, so a hug or a gushing introduction (“This is my assistant, I just love her to death”) raised no suspicions. “She wouldn’t be labeled that way with me.”17

  * * *

  In 1989, “being labeled”—which was to say being out of the closet—meant something quite different than it had a decade before. Before AIDS, Edmund White could say that if Susan had been publicly identified as gay, she would have lost two-thirds of her readership. But AIDS forced a revolution in the way “labels” were perceived. Every year of the epidemic—in which first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions died—brought new ideas about how to contend with it, and with the labels it imposed on those who, for whatever reason, would not have voluntarily embraced them.

  By 1989, the radicals had the upper hand. The Reagan administration, whose spokesmen guffawed at mentions of the “gay cancer,” was replaced by the Bush administration, whose campaign ginned up attacks on gay people in the name of “family values.” These attacks were not merely rhetorical. Gay people had been dying of a disease that would surely have been combated far more aggressively if it had not been associated with homosexuals. (As indeed it was, when it became apparent that it was not restricted to gays.) Gay people were dying as a result of the words of Reagan and Bush: 30 percent of the teen suicides in America were gay kids, according to the same United States government whose leaders were fomenting hatred of them.18 It was a desperate situation, and desperate people fought back. The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, ACT UP, was founded in 1987. It took gay anger to the streets and choreographed high-profile demonstrations against the organs of repression, from the Catholic Church to the Food and Drug Administration. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan had denounced the idea that “cancer = death.” Now, the activists carried signs reading “Silence = Death.”

  The most enduring legacy of the late eighties in AIDS activism proved to be its critique of silence, which is to say: of the closet. That critique departed from the proposition that homosexuality was a natural orientation, exactly like heterosexuality. The simplicity of this statement gave it sweeping implications that were only beginning to emerge under the pressure of the crisis. The gay activists stated that sexuality—in sharp contrast to sex—was no more “private” than being black or female or Catholic. They demanded that gay lives be discussed in the same way that straight lives were. This was radical because the media went to bizarre lengths to pretend that gay people were straight. “The American media didn’t report about the lives of famous queers because they saw homosexuality as the most disgusting thing imaginable,” wrote Michelangelo Signorile in 1993, “worse than extramarital affairs, abortions, boozing, divorces, or out-of-wedlock babies, all of which are fodder for the press.”19

  With his column in the short-lived OutWeek magazine, Signorile became notorious for revealing the homosexuality of famous people. It is hard to imagine, at this distance, the controversy these revelations unleashed, if only because they touched upon people “everyone knew” were gay. It was not, for example, stunning to learn that the flamboyant socialite and prominent Fabergé collector Malcolm Forbes was gay. But this was not something one could say in print—though he was dead when Signorile wrote about him in 1990. The New York Times gingerly referred to the controversy as involving a “recently deceased businessman.”20 As if accused of some dreadful misdeed, he could not be named.

  The tactic became known as “outing,” after a piece in Time about the Forbes dustup. This was not the activists’ preferred word: “I think the action should simply have been called ‘reporting,’” said Signorile.21 Reporting on public figures’ homosexuality was so outrageous that journalists like Signorile were likened to McCarthyite ayatollahs. But they forced the media to debate its own role in enforcing the closet. “So much of the media at that time was clearly biased,” Signorile wrote. “The lives of lesbians and gay men were grossly distorted.”22 Gay people had gained a sympathetic space in the media in the seventies, but they had been caught by the broader cultural backlash of the Reagan era. This was racial: Reagan and Bush exploited resistance to the civil rights movement. It was economic: Reagan and Bush rolled back the social-democratic vision of the Great Society. And it was sexual. In the eighties, Signorile wrote, lesbians were repeatedly being defamed on-screen: “This was directly due to the backlash against the women’s movement; independent, assertive women were presented as villainous, man-hating dykes. Negative portrayals of gay men also escalated dramatically amid the AIDS
crisis.”23

  Thirty years after Susan first read it, the situation was not far from Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, in which a lesbian’s losing her child—but not being killed—was considered an upbeat ending. It was imperative for gays and lesbians to resist those portrayals by showing their real faces, defining themselves rather than allowing their enemies to define them. The “outers” insisted that people who did not come out perpetuated the idea that gayness was something to be ashamed of, and the coming of AIDS made the situation so urgent that everyone, especially prominent people, had to take a position.

  Despite the fiery controversy, the outers’ analysis triumphed so completely that dishonesty about sexuality came to be seen as pathetic at best, pathological at worst. This had not been the case, even among gays themselves. But they would soon view closet cases with the contempt African Americans reserved for light-skinned blacks who tried to “pass,” or Jews reserved for coreligionists who changed their names and joined clubs from which other Jews were barred. This was a revolution, and Signorile marveled at how much had changed, and how fast:

  Even five years ago, many in the mainstream considered it an “embarrassment” to be out of the closet, “flaunting” one’s sexuality. People who were doing that were said to be “indiscreet” and were even considered “unfashionable.” But outing focused attention on the closet and what a horrible, pitiful place the closet is. Outing demands that everyone come out, and defines the closeted—especially those in power—as cowards who are stalling progress. With outing, the tables have turned completely: It is now an embarrassment to be in the closet.24

  * * *

  “Even five years ago”: these words were written in 1993. Those years spanned the publication of AIDS and Its Metaphors and the beginning of Susan’s relationship with Annie; and the problems in both book and relationship bear the unmistakable mark of the closet. Gays had always associated bitchiness and vindictiveness with the closet, even when the closet was the only option. Self-loathing translated into contempt and cruelty; lying about who one was bled into lying tout court. It made people mean.

  Like the moral opprobrium attached to illnesses like cancer or addiction, the opprobrium surrounding homosexuality was eroding with remarkable speed. But Sontag’s refusal to say “my body” perversely made AIDS and Its Metaphors more interesting than it would have been otherwise. This is not to say that the book would not have qualities without the illustrations her own life offered of the problems she denounced. As so often in her work, its basic theme is the distance between thing and metaphor, and it examines particularly metaphors of the body—“the body as temple,” “the body as factory,” “the body as a fortress”—in order to dismantle them.25 She traces these ideas in her own work, all the way back to “Against Interpretation.” And she announces that her purpose in Illness as Metaphor was

  not to confer meaning, which is the traditional purpose of literary endeavor, but to deprive something of meaning: to apply that quixotic, highly polemical strategy, “against interpretation,” to the real world this time. To the body. My purpose was, above all, practical. For it was my doleful observation, repeated again and again, that the metaphoric trappings that deform the experience of having cancer have very real consequences.26

  The link she establishes between interpretation (language, metaphor) and the real world (body, medicine, politics) adds a rich new layer to her previous works. Her insistence on seeing the disaster in scientific rather than moral terms is salutary. And her reading of AIDS as the end of something—exuberant sexual customs—is interesting, too: however inevitable and necessary, the insistence on “safe sex” was a downer, a disappointment, part of the end of the attempts to find newer, freer ways of living that characterized the sixties.

  These attempts were marginalized in the eighties,

  part of a larger grateful return to what is perceived as “conventions,” like the return to figure and landscape, tonality and melody, plot and character, and other much vaunted repudiations of difficult modernism in the arts. . . . The new sexual realism goes with the rediscovery of the joys of tonal music, Bouguereau, a career in investment banking, and church weddings.27

  Despite its grim subject, the book is fun to read. It displays the humor Sontag was often accused of lacking, particularly when making striking connections with apposite quotations. She links the new fear of the HIV virus to the new fear of computer viruses—like AIDS, the personal computer was among the revolutions of the 1980s—comparing the insistence on condom use with a line from an advertisement: “Never put a disk in your computer without verifying its source.”28 The light touch makes the book far more accessible than many of her others.

  Yet something in Sontag still felt that a choice needed to be made between substance and style, body and mind, thing and image, reality and dream. In The Benefactor, her character embraced the dream to the complete exclusion of reality. Over the years, she had moved, sometimes haltingly, sometimes with furious insistence, in the other direction. Reality, in her mind, could best be perceived once metaphor had been exiled. With the iconoclastic fervor of a disappointed believer, she had hacked away at metaphor, and now attacked the war metaphors associated with AIDS: “We are not being invaded,” she concluded. “The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy.”29

  But one need not abuse metaphor to think that the body was, in fact, a battlefield (between healthy cells and infected ones); or that the virus was in fact invading people’s bodies; and that if the ill were not the enemy, they were, at least up to that point, unavoidable casualties. In 1989, AIDS was still a death sentence.

  * * *

  Sontag’s early novels had plenty of detractors. But if those books were failures, they were brave, noble failures—unforgettable. And her books on related subjects, from Against Interpretation to On Photography to Illness as Metaphor, were undergirded by a passion all the more palpable for being unstated.

  They changed the way you saw the world.

  You never forgot them.

  The problems with AIDS and Its Metaphors become clear when read alongside other works of the age: Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, Andrew Holleran’s The Beauty of Men, Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, Randy Shilts’s And the Band Played On. These diverse books—plays, novels, memoirs, histories—are united by sheer heartbreak. Beside them, and even beside “The Way We Live Now,” Sontag’s contribution seems thin, dainty, detached: forgettable because lacking the sense of what AIDS meant to my friends, my lovers, my body. Her metalinguistic critique is important, but those books contain it, too; and the critics who had made it before her go unmentioned. This is noteworthy because the gay critique—the outers’ critique—was the same as hers.

  Banish metaphor: “the body.”

  Embrace reality: “my body.”

  And so the importance of Sontag’s book is how it inadvertently illustrates the very thing it denounces. Its pages reveal how quickly metaphor can slide into obfuscation, abstraction, lying. “I try abstractly,” she had written years before; and on any given subject, abstraction and distance are always good measures of her passion. Here, wrote the critic Craig Seligman, her leaden prose has “a muting effect, like wall-to-wall carpeting.” He tallied, in a single paragraph, the following examples of the passive voice:

  considered by . . . is judged . . . is understood as . . . are currently being told that . . . regarded as . . . is named as . . . is thought to be . . . are seen as . . . fostered by . . . could be viewed as . . . who cannot by any stretch of the blaming faculty be considered . . . may be as ruthlessly ostracized by . . .30

  The passive voice allows the writer, quite literally, to avoid the “I.” In a puzzled review in the Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that “she never quite defines whatever it is that ultimately concerns her.” This echoes Silvers’s criticism of her Sartre essay: “the reader has
no idea of the status of the connection being made.”31 The passive voice—the voice of bureaucracy, of wall-to-wall carpeting—was not appropriate at a time when so many were screaming.

  Not everyone—not every writer—needed to scream. But Sontag had always been willing to put her body on the line, and scorned those who did not: those who failed to make the trip to Hanoi or Havana; those who refused to risk death for Salman Rushdie or, soon, Sarajevo. The new AIDS activism was her kind of activism. She would not have needed to storm the Pentagon or ambush the cardinal-archbishop of New York. But there was much she could have done, and gay activists implored her to do the most basic, most courageous, most principled thing of all. They asked her to say “I,” to say “my body”: to come out of the closet. Signorile called Leibovitz’s studio day after day, asking her and Susan to comment on their relationship. Neither returned his calls.

  “My purpose was, above all, practical,” she wrote, in AIDS and Its Metaphors, about her reasons for writing Illness as Metaphor. AIDS activists thought she could have had a great practical impact on the demoralized and dying gay community by saying that she was one of them. What would it have meant—practically—for one of the most famous writers in the country, a writer whose cultural authority was unparalleled, to say that she was in a relationship with another famous woman? Signorile described the effect she could have had:

  Imagine if she were at the FDA. . . . The other thing that is less obvious if Susan Sontag came out was the effect on editors and writers and newspaper editorialists. There were so many problems just with the New York Times. First was getting them to simply cover the epidemic. Second was getting their medical editors to do the kind of independent investigations at the FDA and the NIH that needed to be done. Getting the political editors focused on the Reagan-Bush years. . . . All of it becomes about people getting the courage to speak out. When one person speaks out, it gives somebody else a little bit more courage to speak out. It just has that effect.32