As so often in her life, art kept her sane. In the hopes that it would give her energy to do her physical therapy, she was put on increasingly high doses of Ritalin, but the drug did not work. The only things that distracted her were talking about the past, watching movies, and being read to.
“I can’t emphasize enough that she really loves being read to,” Karla wrote the inner circle on September 22. “I think her mind is hungry, and it needs to be fed. My main job (besides being an extra hand for the staff when needed) is giving some mental stimulation.” Three days later, she wrote:
She seemed to feel particularly humiliated by everything today. I’m telling her how much I admire the way she’s handling this, and that I know it must be unspeakably difficult. Don’t know how much that helps. This is a very despondent person. She only seems happy when she’s being read to, and keeps saying that the only thing that’s real is the book.25
When Karla left to return home to New Mexico, she tried to bid Susan farewell; but Susan did not want to acknowledge that this leave-taking was final. “Oh, darling,” she said, “the next time you’re in New York, we must go out for dim sum.”
* * *
There was reason to believe that, despite the pain, humiliation, and boredom, she might recover. On September 26, just before she left, Karla wrote that “it appears that the cancer is in remission and that the graft is being accepted. The body’s response to the graft seems almost too perfect.” By the time Peter Perrone returned, there was more hope: she was moved to a floor of the hospital reserved for patients whose recovery was advancing, and was delighted by this sign of progress.26
That hope was soon extinguished. She was developing graft-versus-host disease, a feared consequence of transplants: the body’s own cells begin attacking the transplanted cells, which it sees as invaders. On November 9, she was moved back downstairs. “It’s an incredibly intricate story,” David wrote Sharon, “not great, the bottom line is the GVHD is serious, it’s enough.”27 They had to await another bone-marrow biopsy—another hideously painful procedure.
Her friends in New York, including Sharon and Annie, scrambled to make arrangements in case the transplant failed. On November 9, David wrote Dr. Stephen Nimer, her oncologist in New York.
My mother’s situation may, I emphasize may, be coming to a point where it might be better for her to come home. [Her Seattle doctors] tell me that much depends on the bone marrow biopsy they are going to perform in the next few days. If it’s bad, they seem to be suggesting she might be better off in New York, but I am starting to wonder even if it does not show that she has converted to full-blown AML [acute myeloid leukemia], if that’s the right term, whether she might not be better off at Sloan Kettering.28
The results were as feared. On Saturday, November 13, David, Peter Perrone, and her team of six doctors delivered the dreadful news. “But this means I am dying!” she screamed.
“Susan collapsed on herself,” said Peter. A doctor’s assistant tried to comfort her.
“You might want to take this time to concentrate on your spiritual values.”
“I have no spiritual values!”
“You might want to take this time to be with your friends.”
“I have no friends!”29
Annie rushed to Seattle. When she arrived, Peter said, she knew exactly what to do.
It was really beautiful, because Susan was basically inconsolable at that point. Because she knew what it meant. Annie came in and immediately crawled onto her bed and held her. It was just so . . . I don’t know, it was just really the right thing to do, that no one else could have done. It really did comfort Susan for the moment, and calm her down.30
* * *
Two days later, on November 15, Annie brought her back to New York on a medevac plane, and she was admitted to Sloan Kettering. The heroic depressive had always managed to pull herself out of despondency, and people who came to visit were sometimes staggered by her vigor. The next morning, she was sitting in bed, reading The New Republic and complaining about one of the articles.31 And she continued to tinker with the last piece of writing she would complete, an introduction to the Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier. In it, she quoted one of his characters, who seemed to offer a witty gloss on her own writing:
“Don’t be personal. Be dry! . . . Write in the third person as much as possible . . . No verifying! . . . Don’t forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth . . . When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they’re lying or telling the truth . . . Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity. Don’t correct them, and don’t try to interpret them either.”32
David read Don Juan. Peter Perrone read The Death of Ivan Ilyich, hoping to spark a conversation about death. He could not, though there were moments when she spoke of the end. At Sloan Kettering, she summoned David to her bedside. “The most important thing I’m leaving you is my journals,” she said. “There are a few things that should be taken out”—she meant the names of some of her lovers—“but they should be published.”33 And she chose the music for her funeral: Beethoven’s last piano sonata, no. 32; and one of his final string quartets, no. 15. Of this work, T. S. Eliot had written to Stephen Spender: “I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering.”34
That reconciliation—that relief—would not come. Spurred by Dr. Nimer’s mention of an experimental drug, she rallied, again and again, a willfulness that amazed Marcel van den Brink, a physician who met her at this time. He saw how she vacillated between “I don’t want this anymore. I realize that it’s hopeless” and, within a matter of seconds, “I don’t want to give up. Give me another drug.” Dr. Van den Brink wondered whether it was wise to encourage her. “One could debate if that was giving her false hope.” She was too far gone for a new therapy to make a difference.
Normally people at that stage would be tired of the long battle that they have fought. They might do this once or twice, maybe, might still say, “No, no, no, please still try to give me another drug and see if you can save me.” She died still going like a pendulum, going back and forth in a few seconds from “I can’t stand this anymore, I want to give up” to “No, actually, still please give me the drug.” That is somewhat unusual. I have not seen that often, that people would do that until the last moment.35
She needed to stay alive; she had work to do. The standards of perfection she had internalized as a child were impossible to let go. She “spoke, when she could speak, of what she could do when she got out of the hospital,” David wrote. “She would write in a different way, get to know new people, do some of the things she had been meaning to do.”36 When Andrew Wylie found her asleep one day, she insisted, flustered, that he had it wrong. She had not been asleep. She was working.37
Asleep, she dreamed of persecution. One night in December, she dreamed that Hitler was chasing her. On December 18, Sharon was surprised to find her making painstaking efforts to be nice to a nurse she had never liked. This was because of a paranoid delusion. She thought the nurses had held a secret night meeting. They decided she was mean and arrogant and were all against her. She was determined to win them back.38
* * *
As a young woman, Sontag noted some last words in her journal. Gertrude Stein emerged from her coma to demand of her companion: “Alice, Alice, what is the answer?”
“There is no answer,” Alice Toklas replied.
“Well, then,” Stein said, “what is the question?”
Of Henry James, she wrote:
A Remington was the only typewriter whose rhythms he could bear, + on his deathbed—at his last moments—he called for his Remington. And she [his secretary] typed for him. Jame
s died to the tune of his typewriter. Flaubert would have appreciated this—pathos of the artist’s vocation.39
“Get me out of here,” she begged Annie on Christmas Day, grabbing her sleeve. Annie had to leave to visit her father in Florida; he died six weeks later.40 “I kissed her goodbye,” said Annie, “and I said I love you, and she said I love you.”41 On December 26, she gasped for breath, speaking of only two people: her mother and Joseph Brodsky.42 On December 27, she asked: “Is David here?” He answered that he was, and she said: “I want to tell you . . .”;43 and then nothing more.
Epilogue
The Body and Its Metaphors
Susan Sontag, New York, February 11, 2000. Photograph by Richard Avedon. © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
After Sontag died, at 7:10 in the morning of December 28, David opened her gown and gazed upon her body: a mass of bruises, black and blue.1 As the group of her friends looked on, he kissed her mastectomy scars.2 The other person closest to her needed her own evidence that this larger-than-life woman was dead. At the funeral chapel, Annie clothed her in a Fortuny dress they had bought together in Milan. The images she made showed a beautifully dressed corpse—nothing more. The most recognizable writer of her generation was gone.
David decided to bury her in Paris, at Montparnasse. The funeral, on January 17, 2005, was a homecoming of sorts. She would keep eternal company with Sartre, Cioran, Barthes, Beckett—the ideal family of which she had dreamed in Tucson. Annie paid for many friends to attend. But for many who came, it was a dismal farewell. Kasia Gorska, who had flown in from Warsaw, said tactfully: “It was the most unusual funeral I’ve ever been to.”3 Marina Abramović was similarly depressed: “She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral. . . . It was rainy. It was all wrong.” 4 Sharon DeLano was disappointed by the size of the crowd, by invitation only: “If it had been up to Susan, people would have been throwing flowers in the streets.”5
* * *
On March 30, a memorial was held in Zankel Hall, in the basement of Carnegie Hall. Though many friends were present and Mitsuko Uchida played Schoenberg and Beethoven, this occasion, too, left hard feelings.
For the guests, Annie and Sharon had produced a beautiful book. It showed Susan and Judith in Arizona, and then an elegant tour of her life in pictures by some of the great photographers of the twentieth century. There was Susan by Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell and Richard Avedon and Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe and Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn and, finally, Annie Leibovitz herself.
But David refused to allow the book to be distributed with the program, inside the auditorium. Annie and Sharon had to hand it out to guests as they arrived, in the street-level foyer. After the ceremony, friends were divided between “David people” and “Annie people.” Annie and David each hosted a reception, but not everyone understood that a choice had to be made. “If you’re going to her thing, you can’t come to ours,” Paolo Dilonardo told several mourners.6
Judith, who had come from Hawaii to New York in midwinter, borrowed one of her sister’s coats; as she got into the taxi for the airport, David asked for it back. “Good-bye, David,” Judith said, refusing to take the coat off. Annie took a coat, too, a cherished memento she had bought Susan on one of their Christmas trips to Venice. Paolo accused her of stealing, and the next time she came to the apartment, she found the locks changed to keep her out.7
* * *
Eventually, two books that dealt with her death would appear, two competing narratives: David’s Swimming in a Sea of Death and Annie’s A Photographer’s Life. Many of those who had accompanied Susan in her last months found David’s account dissembling, and many of those who distrusted Annie found her images of Susan’s suffering obscene.
Leibovitz’s book elicited phrases even fiercer than those On Photography had provoked thirty years before. “Really, it’s a matter of when you find yourself throwing up,”8 wrote the critic David Thomson. Others found the book moving. It is the only occasion on which Annie published her assignment work with personal Photograph—her family at play, her father’s death, the births of her children. But the book does raise uncomfortable questions—the same raised in On Photography. In that book, Sontag wrote that Photograph allowed reality, including the reality of other people’s suffering, to be packaged as a consumer item. She cited an advertisement:
“Prague . . . Woodstock . . . Vietnam . . . Sapporo . . . Londonderry . . . LEICA.” Crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are alike—are equalized by the camera. Taking Photograph has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.9
As if to illustrate how the camera’s mechanical eye flattens all experience, Leibovitz shows spreads of Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and then, a couple of pages later, the bloody handprints of massacred Rwandan schoolchildren. She shows beautiful bodies—Leonardo DiCaprio with a swan around his neck; Cindy Crawford, nude, with a snake around hers—alongside Bosnian war victims, juxtapositions that recall On Photography.
That book’s most troubling questions are those about the depiction of bodies. The metaphor of the photograph, the image, had triumphed over reality, Susan wrote: “One of the perennial successes of photography has been its strategy of turning living beings into things, things into living beings.”10 And these things were more often than not living beings in pain, “the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy.”11
Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation. Through the camera people become customers or tourists of reality . . . for reality is understood as plural, fascinating, and up for grabs.12
Yet omitting the suffering would have betrayed the book’s title. “A Photographer’s Life tells a love story,” Leibovitz said. “That’s what it is.”13 It shows their relationship: the happiness of their early days, their many travels together, and how the story ended. The births of her children, the deaths of her father and her partner, made it intensely personal. “When I was making the book, in a driven, obsessive way, I somehow hadn’t imagined that other people would be looking at it,” she later said.14 The debates the pictures ignited—debates about the ethics of photography, about how to regard the pain of others—were an homage to Sontag’s thought.
* * *
Meanwhile, at Montparnasse, the grave site was attracting pilgrims. The black slab covering her remains grew into one of the most visited destinations in a cemetery packed with the illustrious dead, and was often heaped with flowers or stones.
Yet in an ironic tribute to her life, it was not Susan Sontag’s body these visitors honored. It was what she had stood for. After her death, it no longer mattered, exactly, that she had written bad books as well as great ones, or said dumb things as well as brilliant ones, or been wrong as well as right. The same could be said of any writer.
What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized. To those inspired by the image of Sontag calmly fighting cancer, it was not so important that the real Susan had, like anyone else, been terrified. To those carrying posters of Sontag at protest marches, it hardly mattered that her own fights against injustice had been marred by hesitations.
She showed how to remain anchored in the achievements of the past while embracing her own century. She demonstrated endless admiration for art and beauty—and endless contempt for intellectual and spiritual vulgarity. She impressed generations of women as a thinker unafraid of men, and unaware she ought to be. She stood for self-improvement—for making oneself into something greater than what one was expected to be. She symbolized the writer who ranged widely without falling into either overspecialization or dilettantism. She represented the hope for a tolerant and diverse America that would engage with other nations without chauvinism
. She stood for the social role of the artist, and showed how the artist might resist political tyranny. And she held out hope for the permanence of culture in a world besieged by the indifferent and the cruel.
* * *
The great modern writer, Canetti wrote, “is original; he sums up his age; he opposes his age.”
After Sontag’s death, when new phenomena arose that demanded interpretation, people often wondered what she would have made of them, and said they missed her. This was not because her answers had always been right. It was because for almost fifty years, she, more than any other prominent public thinker, had set the terms of the cultural debate in a way that no intellectual had done before, or has done since. One could argue with her; whether one agreed or disagreed with her conclusions—whether she herself agreed or disagreed with her conclusions—she had both summed up and opposed her age.
The relation of language to reality was her theme. Neither language nor reality is stable, and in a notoriously turbulent century, no writer reflected their instability as well as Sontag. The meaning of culture changed over her lifetime, and so did the understanding of its relationship to society. These changes amounted to a change in how, in the modern age, a person was to live—including how a woman was to live, and how a gay person was to live. And she traced changing attitudes toward how a person was to die.
In politics, Sontag’s life showed how unstable even the biggest words—“socialism,” “art,” “democracy”—could be. She showed the wild fluctuations, the clashing connotations, of the term “America.” She was there when the Cuban Revolution began; she was there when the Berlin Wall came down; she was in Hanoi under bombardment; she was in Israel for the Yom Kippur War. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the pull and tug of money and celebrity, and she was there when many gave in. She witnessed great changes in science and medicine, from the shifting fortunes of Sigmund Freud to the new understandings of drug and alcohol use to the emergence of a new psychology.
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