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| Susan Sontag, 1968 |
Born in New York to a father who died when she was five, and a mother who remarried, Susan lived in many places, finding her strength in books. She got her first degree from the University of Chicago’s great books program at 18. She married Philip Rieff and had a son, David, at age 17. She went on to get an M.A. in Philosophy at Harvard and made her living teaching until she received a fellowship to Oxford, where she escaped to spend time alone, there and in Paris.
Returning to New York in 1959, Susan established herself as a writer. She first became widely known for “Notes on Camp,” which discussed high and low culture and its relative seriousness. In Against Interpretation, she described how the critique of art by intellectuals had taken over the enjoyment of it. She went to Hanoi in 1968 and wrote about her trip positively.
In 1975, Susan was diagnosed with cancer and went through aggressive treatment for it. She never stopped working, however, publishing On Photography in 1977. In this essay, which became a book, she describes the consumerist result of the proliferation of images and how it levels all experiences. In Illness as Metaphor, she describes how victims were blamed for their illness, in the case of cancer or tuberculosis, adding to their suffering. These books had big impacts on the way photography and cancer were discussed.
Susan was also writing fiction and making films at the time, though these works were not as widely known. She was a powerful, “fierce,” figure among New York intellectuals, becoming president of the PEN American Center. When a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie for blasphemy, Susan supported him, rallying writers to his cause. She was also a great friend of Joseph Brodsky, a Russian dissident who ended up in New York. Brodsky had an uncompromising value for literature similar to Susan’s. Literature tamed people. It sensitized and humanized them. Susan felt Brodsky was one of the few people with standards as high as her own.
Susan had many relationships with both men and women. In 1989 she met the photographer Annie Leibovitz, who was almost as famous as she. Susan would not admit to their relationship, as she did not want to be labeled, but according to Annie, they helped each other through their lives until Susan’s death in 2004.
In 1992, Sarajevo was beseiged for four years. Susan lived for long periods of time in the city during the siege, and mounted Waiting for Godot while there. “No one cared about us,” said the residents, “except Susan. Her presence was very helpful.” It was Susan’s way of saying, “culture is something worth dying for.”
The relation of language to reality was Susan’s theme, suggests Benjamin Moser, whose biography, Sontag: Her Life and Work, came out in 2019. Neither is stable and over the course of her life there was much change. “Literature is the passport to a larger life,” Susan said, when she was given the German Peace Prize in 2004. “Literature is freedom, especially in a time when reading and inwardness are challenged.”
In 2004, in response to a cancer of the blood, Susan again fought aggressively. She tried to put mind over matter, had a bone marrow transplant, but it did not succeed. She was buried in Paris.
I mostly experienced Susan’s work as it appeared in The New York Review of Books, following her story at a distance. But she did inspire me, particularly in the value for seriousness and literature, which I too regard as foundational.
