Notes on Sontag (Writers on Writers)

254 Pages·2009·1.28 MB·English

by  Phillip Lopate

* Notes oN soNtag
Writers on Writers
Also by PhilliP loPAte
essays
Being with Children
Bachelorhood
against Joie de Vivre
Portrait of My Body
totally tenderly tragically
Waterfront: a Walk around Manhattan
rudy Burckhardt: Life and Work
Getting Personal: selected Writings
FiCtion
Confessions of summer
the rug Merchant
two Marriages
Poetry
the eyes Don’t always Want to stay open
the Daily round
eDiteD antHoL oGies
Journal of a Living experiment: the First ten years
of teachers & Writers Collaborative
the art of the Personal essay: an anthology
from the Classical era to the Present
Writing new york
american Movie Critics: an anthology
from the silents Until now
PHiLLiP LoPate * Notes oN soNtag
PrinCeton UniVersity Press
Princeton and oxford
Copyright © 2009 by Phillip Lopate
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford
Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lopate, Phillip, 1943–
Notes on Sontag / by Phillip Lopate.
p. cm. — (Writers on writers)
ISBN 978-0-691-13570-0 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. Sontag, Susan, 1933–2004—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Women and literature—United States—History—20th
century. 3. United States—Intellectual life—20th century.
I. Title.
PS3569.O6547Z76 2009
818.’5409—dc22 2008041120
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Minion Pro with Myriad Pro
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
press.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
* list of AbbreviAtions
books
AAIM Aids and Its Metaphors (Picador, 1990)
AI Against Interpretation (Dell, 1966)
ATST At the Same Time (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2007)
DK Death Kit (Signet, 1968)
IA In America (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 2000)
IAM Illness as Metaphor (Picador, 1990)
IE I, Etcetera (Vintage, 1979)
OP On Photography (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1977)
RPO Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador,
2003)
SRW Styles of Radical Will (Picador, 2002)
TB ἀ e Benefactor (Writers and Readers
Publishing Cooperative, 1983)
TTH Trip to Hanoi (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1968)
TWWLN ἀ e Way We Live Now (Noonday, 1991)
VL ἀ e Volcano Lover (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1992) .
Articles, DiAries, AnD interviews
AR Introduction, “On Posters,” in Dugald
Stermer, ἀ e Art of Revolution: 96
Posters from Cuba (London: Pall Mall,
1970)
NYTM Diary Excerpts, New York Times
Magazine, September 10, 2006
JA “Interview with Susan Sontag,” in Joan
Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two
Saints (Pantheon, 2007)
PIL “Pilgrimage,” New Yorker, December
21, 1987
TWW “The Third World of Women,” Partisan
Review 40, no. 1 (1973)
vi &
* iNtroductioN 
the Judgment
* For a writer to attempt a book about another
writer, it requires nerve, some guild sympathy,
and perhaps a dose of narcissistic projection.
Also timing: when Ivan Bunin, who knew Che-
khov, was asked after the older writer’s death to
do a biography of him, he hesitated. He waited
almost fifty years, accruing nerve, writing his fic-
tion, winning the Nobel Prize, until, at the brink
of his own death, he composed a small book
largely made up of questions about Che khov
and the unknowableness of any human being by
another.
& 1
I cannot wait to win the Nobel Prize. The idea
of one writer meditating on another holds enor-
mous appeal for me, because we feed so much
on each other’s marrow. So when Princeton Uni-
versity Press, informing me of its intent to start a
new series in which one writer would write about
another, asked me which author I would choose
were I to participate, I thought of Susan Sontag
and immediately accepted. Her name popped
into my mind because I had been recently mull-
ing over the nature of her achievement and
reputation. I had noted the curiously polarized
critical responses she seemed to inspire: a ten-
dency while she was alive to treat her with a
deference bordering on awe, and, once she had
died, to begin to disparage her. I counted myself
in the middle: that is, I had always admired her
as a writer, had been inspired by her essays par-
ticularly, though I often felt divided—loving one
passage, not able to accept another—and this
ambivalence struck me as a promising basis for
a work of literary reflection. Had I chosen some
writer whom I purely adulated, such as Mon-
taigne or Hazlitt, I not only would have had to
write on my knees, an awkward position, but
I sensed I might have run out of things to say.
My mixed feelings about Sontag would keep me
indefinitely engaged. I could “stage” my ambiva-
2 &
lence, and work through it to some resolution—
or at least come to understand my own thought
processes better, the customary work of an essay.
If, as it has turned out, I sometimes seemed to be
taking back with one hand what I’d given with
another, the objectives I’ve tried to hold in mind
are balance, fairness, and honesty. Those who
are looking for a hatchet-job here will be as dis-
appointed as those seeking hagiography.
The goal of objectivity has been complicated
by the fact that I knew Susan Sontag, however
slightly, over the years. We were acquaintances,
never forming either a friendship or an enmity.
The professional life of a mid-list writer is likely
to be punctuated from time to time by encounters
with literary luminaries who are far more famous
and celebrated, providing rich occasions for grat-
itude, resentment, or amusing memoir fodder, as
the case may be. I would like to think that my
encounters with the subject of this book have not
unduly colored my opinions of her written work.
My decision to write about these encounters—
that is, to introduce the word “I” into what is
otherwise largely a work of criticism, which may
strike some as unseemly—has to do with the fact
that I am trained as a personal essayist, but also
because I can’t help hoping that by showing the
way Susan Sontag responded to situations in the
tHe JUDGMent & 3