by Edmund White
She liked to come to my little one-room apartment for dinner if other amusing people were there. Once I had her with Robert Mapplethorpe and the female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon, the subject of Mapplethorpe’s book Lady. Lyon wasn’t a freak or carnival performer but rather someone who exhibited her remarkable body in the art world, at galleries and museums. She was educated and well-spoken, and when she was wearing a simple black dress with sleeves and a full bodice, she didn’t even look muscular. But there at the table (she was a good sport) she pushed her sleeves back and made a muscle. We all had to touch the huge, hard mound—she was impressive. For a while Mapplethorpe wanted to marry her.
Susan felt relaxed around David Kalstone, who was a born courtier without ever being obsequious. Perhaps my best plum was Fran Lebowitz, the comic writer, who kept us sick with laughter with her constant, dry drolleries. Fran, who was wildly famous at the time, had written a blurb for my States of Desire. Though she dressed in men’s clothes, she, too, almost never spoke about her lesbianism—certainly not in public. Later she became a sort of court jester—no, that’s mean, perhaps “funny companion”—to different rich gay or bisexual men such as Malcolm Forbes and Barry Diller and David Geffen. Forbes had a château in Normandy where he had hot-air-balloon races. While the men were swooping around outside competing, their wives were doing their nails inside and responding with various degrees of interest to Fran’s advances. When I wrote a magazine article about David Geffen, one of Hollywood’s biggest moguls and art collectors, Fran gave me some great quotes about how Geffen and Barry Diller, owner of QVC, the shopping channel, among other things, would quarrel on the yacht over who was first in line to read the one copy of Jack Warner’s biography. Perhaps Geffen quietly settled the dispute by being the one who’d bought the Warner house, one of the grandest mansions in Los Angeles.
Susan and Fran started going to fashion shows together, and Susan’s appearance at such frivolous events was noteworthy enough to make the gossip columns. America’s leading female intellectual checks out the new spring frocks—that was the sort of headlines she was getting. Then suddenly they seemed to have a falling-out. What had happened? Had Fran finally put the make on Susan? Did Susan refuse to put out? We never knew. Fran herself, though always polite, seemed less friendly around me.
Susan’s closest friend was her son, David Rieff. For two years he and I were virtually inseparable and I was very, very fond of him. He had grown up with “gay uncles” such as Richard Howard and Jasper Johns, and I seemed to be falling into the familiar mode of the queer avuncular, though in my mind we were something more like cousins. David could be as contemptuous of other people as his mother was, but for the most part he seemed admiring and vulnerable and just a bit of a puppy dog. He had his mother’s strong features and long hair and sometimes was mistaken for her, though he disapproved of being introduced as Susan Sontag’s son. He seemed more amazed by my coarseness than to be genuinely reprimanding the one time I made this mistake out of social anxiety. But soon afterward I heard him phone in a reservation at a tony Manhattan restaurant under the name David Sontag instead of David Rieff. I suppose the dependents of famous people always face that dilemma and shift about according to the occasion. Once Jackson Pollock’s widow upbraided me for introducing her as Lee Pollock, though when I was presenting her to another celebrity, I was careful to call her Lee Krasner and she chimed in simultaneously with “Pollock.”
David attributed more savoir vivre to me than I really possessed and would often greet my innocent remarks with a sly or knowing smile. He had an affair with Mariana Cook, a photographer who became a friend of mine. Then he fell for Sarah, a complex blond beauty who was the daughter of Peter Matthiessen, the American naturalist and novelist. Matthiessen was some sort of Zen master who’d built a meditation pavilion in his garden, but she made him sound cruel and conceited. His uncle had been F. O. Matthiessen, the famous homosexual Harvard professor who wrote American Renaissance, about Emerson and Whitman—and who committed suicide by jumping from a window in 1950. Sarah complained that her father wouldn’t allow the uncle’s name to be mentioned in his presence, but I have no idea if that was true. Sarah seemed high-strung but was so WASP that David doted on her.
Jamaica Kincaid was a friend of ours in those exciting days—a tall black woman with a much smaller husband, the composer Allen Shawn, brother of the actor and playwright Wally Shawn, and they were of course the sons of the longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn. When I ran into Jamaica recently after two decades of not seeing her, I asked timidly, “Do you remember me?” and she overwhelmed me by saying, “Of course I remember you—those were some of the happiest days of my life!”
They were happy days for me, too. David was attachant and dear. Susan could be impossibly vain and imperious, but she was also protective and generous. She wrote a blurb for my breakthrough novel, A Boy’s Own Story, which she did in her usual serious, thorough, time-consuming way. Just to write a few lines she felt she had to reread all three of my novels as well as States of Desire. She put me up for a seven-thousand-dollar prize at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which I won, and wrote a letter of recommendation for a twenty-thousand-dollar Guggenheim Fellowship, which I received. After A Boy’s Own Story came out she said, “You’ll never be poor again in your life.” And though I’ve often had to scramble to pay the rent, what she said was true—I was never really desperate again.
I liked to cook for Susan, though I lived so far from the nearest good supermarket, Balducci’s, that I wore myself out carrying groceries through the streets. My menus were also so elaborate that I spent too much money buying all those bay scallops and veal cutlets and devoted too many hours to preparing my heavily sauced dishes. Later, after I lived in France, I realized that I could serve much simpler meals—in fact, my heroic dinners of the pre-Paris days were in dubious taste. I’d spend twelve hours preparing a coulibiac (salmon with mushrooms and rice in a dill-and-sour-cream sauce inside puff pastry), or boeuf à la mode, or a dozen Indian dishes. Like Coleman Dowell, I, too, had become a martyr cook, though on a lesser scale. For me the dinner party was a condensed version of social climbing, intimacy, and commemoration.
For Susan all these themes would coalesce into a lunch at a Chinese restaurant. Years later, after I’d broken with Susan, Marina Warner told me that during a visit to New York she’d met Susan and that I was wrong, she was a delight, no one could be warmer or kinder. I was quick to agree with Marina but I astonished her when I said, “But I’ll tell you exactly how you spent your time with her. She invited you to a good Chinese restaurant and ordered for you and paid for it. Then she accompanied you to several bookshops and expressed her scandalized amazement that you’d never read Trelawny’s Adventures of a Younger Son or Aksakov’s Family Chronicle. She bought those books for you and gave them to you in a nice little ceremonious moment. During the unrushed afternoon she talked to you about her struggle with cancer and her love affairs—five women and four men.” Marina’s jaw dropped and I said, “It’s perfectly sincere, but that’s the day with Susan. Always the same.”
I realized from my own experience that buying the meal, visiting the bookshop, offering the “life-changing” books—all of those rituals had originated with Richard Howard. Susan must have learned to do all those things from him. Like Richard, Susan was a nonacademic intellectual, given to pronouncements, alternately tender and imperious, wildly generous. (True academics never buy meals for each other but split every bill down to the last centime.) Like Richard, Susan knew everything about everything, though neither of them owned a television. She, however, true to her adopted French heritage, knew a lot about the movies (French people are always surprised by how shallow my own “film culture” is, not to mention my nearly nonexistent jazz culture). Susan had first made her reputation by talking about movies seriously, and by directing movies. But she never wrote about the Beatles or The Beverly Hillbillies. Her taste was more inclined toward Godard and Syberberg. Des
pite her early notoriety as an iconoclast, she was serious, even reverential, in her respect for high culture.
Although Susan had dedicated Against Interpretation to Richard Howard, she seldom saw him during the years that she and I were friends. She seemed to have no old friends. Like all famous people she constantly attracted new people, and she didn’t have to cultivate old friendships, resolve disputes, soothe ruffled feathers. She could just move on.
She was a terrible snob. Once I had her to dinner with a beautiful and charming young couple who each eventually went on to write successful novels but who were unknown at the time. Susan said in an embarrassingly loud stage whisper, “Why did you invite them?” I was so vexed that I lied and said, “They’re terribly rich.” Susan nodded sagely, as if that answered all her doubts. In fact, they weren’t rich at all, but later split up and each of them married extremely “well.” Oddly enough, when I invited Susan to dinner in Paris in 1981 with Michel Foucault, he whispered, when she left the room for a moment, “Why did you invite her?” I didn’t realize that he didn’t like to socialize with women, though he was generous and amicable with his female colleagues at work. Foucault and Arlette Farge, for instance, were great friends and did an anthology together of eighteenth-century letters from the Bastille.
Susan was especially close to Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, both from the New York Review of Books, and to Peter Hujar, the photographer. She wrote an introduction to a book of his pictures just as later she prefaced a collection of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Old friends were around but they didn’t divert her, they didn’t promise renewal. Susan was above all a connoisseur, a collector, a sampler. Her son, David, served to bring many new trends and bits of trivia to her attention. Later, after I stopped knowing them, he became an important political critic and thinker, but when we were friends, he had a dandified distaste for politics. In 1981 he wrote a book with Susan’s friend Sharon Delano about Texas boots, whereas fifteen years later he’d be writing books on Bosnia.
Sometimes Susan would fight with David. In any event they would go through periods of not speaking to each other. Exactly what was going on between them wasn’t spelled out. Here again they seemed a bit like royalty—a dispute was registered throughout the court without anyone knowing the precise terms of estrangement.
Susan was also like a queen in the sense that she had a full life, largely ceremonious. She gave lots of talks and traveled far and wide. Suddenly she’d be directing a Pirandello play in Italy starring her ex-girlfriend Adriana Asti (who’d appeared in Pasolini’s Accattone, Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers, and Before the Revolution, by Bertolucci, who’d been Asti’s husband). Then she and James Merrill and I along with D. M. Thomas, the author of The White Hotel, would be giving a colloquium titled “Tradition” for a university in Virginia.
In February 1981 Susan stunned her world of New York liberals and radicals by saying at Town Hall, during a rally for Solidarity in Poland, that American intellectuals had for decades ignored the horrors of communism in order to take a firm stand against redbaiters in Congress and elsewhere. She added that anyone who’d been reading a conservative magazine for the general public such as Reader’s Digest was more likely to be better informed about the true nature of communism than if they’d been reading the Nation or the New Statesman, which consistently hid the truth. In a resounding peroration she declared, “I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.”
I didn’t attend the event but Susan had told me ahead of time what she intended to do, and that it would create quite a fuss, as indeed it did. She was howled off the stage, and for months afterward left-wing thinkers of every stripe relentlessly attacked her. She was giving comfort to the newly elected Reagan. Much to Susan’s dismay she was embraced by the Right and asked to speak at their dinners, which of course she refused to do. She was accused of giving comfort to the pope, who was militating against communism everywhere but especially in Poland. Of course these very left-wing intellectuals were themselves of two minds since they’d gathered at Town Hall in support of Solidarity, which was struggling to end communism in Poland.
I admired Susan’s bravery. In Europe, where the Left had genuine power still and had had to live out its contradictions, virtually no one remained pro-Soviet. Only in America, where the counterculture had marked a whole generation and where the protest against the Vietnam War had turned so many people against the U.S. government, would she have provoked such know-nothing hatred. She was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, her critics said. She had betrayed the cause—whatever that was at this late date. In fact, Susan was speaking to an isolationist and dated and extremely naïve Left.
Because of her close connections to France, Susan had evolved politically more swiftly and surely than her compatriots in her understanding of the horrors of communism—not just the accidents of history connected to a particular tyrant or a particular national tradition, but also the systemic nightmare of communism wherever it appeared around the world. Inevitably it led to a suppression of human rights, an abrogation of justice, penury for most citizens, a terrifying tyranny, the triumph of military might, not to mention the destruction of the environment. (I remember wandering in the Swiss mountains and seeing all the trees that had been turned brown from the pollution blowing down from Eastern European factories.)
Susan was brave. Just as she had spoken out against the New Age nonsense that had accumulated around cancer treatment, a bad case of Blame the Victim, just as she had—with her rabbinical/ dandified divided mind—condemned the frivolous and morally opaque world of photography, in the same way she was now taking on communism. Nothing she said was startling to the initiated, and I was shocked only that such obvious arguments would be considered so provocative. Her genius was in saying the obvious in a strong and dramatic manner.
Once she read something I’d written where I’d carefully ascribed my thoughts to the sources that had inspired me. She said, “Cross all that out. Claim it for yourself. No one will ever notice who said it originally. It weakens your argument to be so scrupulous.” Perhaps she was right, but this kind of recklessness got her into trouble later, when she was caught for plagiarizing, word for word, in a few passages of her novel In America. She was always encouraging me to publish papers I’d present at the institute—but I knew they weren’t original or thought out enough. And I was sure she wouldn’t have made public such half-baked thoughts.
Susan and Richard Howard both came down on me hard in September 1982 when I wrote a prominent review in the New York Times Book Review of Roland Barthes’s book about Japan, Empire of Signs, and A Barthes Reader (which Susan had edited and introduced). Richard was mad because I’d referred only parenthetically to him as Barthes’s “expert translator.” Deeply aggrieved, over the phone he said to me, “Everyone goes on and on about Barthes’s beautiful, original style, but I’m the one who invented that style for English-language readers and I never get any credit, not even from you, my dear! When people praise Barthes’s style, they’re really praising mine.”
Susan was even angrier because I had not quoted from her essay sufficiently or praised it enough, though I’d tried to do both of those things, only not “enough.” Instead I’d quoted Gérard Genette, whose take on Barthes she found “dated” and “irrelevant.” I had been so dutiful in getting in laudatory mentions of my two friends (without seeming toadying, I hoped) that I was surprised by their rancor against me. Suddenly I realized how important the New York Times Book Review was to both of them, how much each of them treasured every “mention” that might heighten their fame—and how correspondingly beleaguered and undervalued they must have felt, they who seemed to me at the pinnacle of literary celebrity.
What their attacks on the phone revealed was the extent to which they a
ssumed I was their puppet in the Bunraku theater of their careers. They were supposed to do all the talking, as in Bunraku, while I was busy gesticulating and bowing and striking their enemies with a sword.
I attended a few sessions of a class Susan taught at the New School on Nietzsche. She did no preparation, didn’t speak from notes, and seemed incapable of serious or trenchant or original reflection. I suppose she felt a certain contempt for the class, which was full of “nobodies” whose opinion didn’t count. I had no doubt that if she wrote an essay on Nietzsche it would be the best imaginable. She once said to me, “Have you ever wondered why my essays are so much more intelligent than I am? That’s because I rewrite them five times and each time I ratchet them up a bit higher. I surpass my own limitations.”
I appreciated her frankness in discussing in a simple way her limitations and amazing strengths. I also admired her acuity in knowing what constituted an improvement.
I once attended a lecture she gave in Paris. I was amazed by how fluent she was in French. She explained to me that she had never studied or practiced French, that she listened to it for years, then suddenly, one day, she opened her mouth and could speak it. Whether true or not—and she was gifted enough in all sorts of ways for it to be a true story—this fable—for to me that’s what it seems like—represents the world according to Susan.
During that lecture I was seated next to a friend of Susan’s, with whom I started chatting. She had a similar tale of language learning. She was Italian but spoke idiomatic American English. When I asked her where she’d learned her English, she said, “In Katherine Dunham’s attic in East St. Louis.” It seemed she’d fallen in love with the great African-American dancer during a performance in Naples. She was just a teen but was completely smitten and followed the Dunham company to Rome. Every night she stood outside the stage door until finally Dunham took pity on her. The girl traveled with them throughout Europe and eventually returned with them to East St. Louis, where Dunham had established a dance center for “ghetto artists” and taught at the nearby University of Southern Illinois in Carbondale. During the summer of 1968, blacks began to riot in a resurgence of an uprising that had started the year before. The Italian girl hid in the attic for weeks with Dunham’s white husband, the set designer John Pratt. Both of them were in danger, she said, because of the color of their skin. In that confined space she mastered her perfect American.
