Sontag (2019)

By Benjamin Moser

Genre: Gargantuanly Long Biography Of An Intellectual That Can’t Decide If It Wants To Demystify Or Further Complicate Its Subject

Recommended For: Someone Who Reads One Passage By Susan Sontag, Is Instantly Moved, And Says How Does Someone Become That?

Susan Sontag looks cool as hell on the cover photo of Benjamin Moser’s 2019 biography of her. I was initially going to write about a reader’s fraught endeavor of taking on a biography of a Canonically Great Intellectual with the same sort of fact-finding, connect-the-dots mission with which they would read a biography of a commander of some ship that shot cannons at someone or something that History later determined deserved to get cannons shot at it. I actually had five paragraphs written about that. 

But it would be borderline irresponsible for me to gloss over how cool she looks on the cover. She is rocking a black leather jacket and a little bit of grey in her hair that suggests I bet you would love to be in a New York loft, surrounded by people of whom you have some vague sense are important or smart, with an hors devours in your hand engaging in deep conversation with me. But buddy, let me tell you something: That would not go well for you. I would absolutely eviscerate you in the realm of considered topics. This leather jacket on you would scream ‘I buy books about economic mindfulness on Amazon dot com.’

She looks cool in that sort of way that people with the hindsight of decades of creative or intellectual brilliance can suggest confidence without trying. The way someone can see a photo of young Bob Dylan that, if you broke it down, literally just looks like A Guy, and say This dude fucking knows he’s Bob Dylan.

That’s all to say that I worry this photo is somewhere between 30% and 95% responsible for the reason Kristen Stewart is set to play Sontag in an adaptation of this biography currently in pre-production. Stewart is a good actor who seems to try to put more artful projects out into the world than your average famous person. That said, I don’t support it. 

Before going any further, I should say that the book is good. Absolute devotees of Sontag’s writing and that era of intellectualism may have varying opinions about it, but it’s extremely well-researched and gives you a ranging and detailed scope of her life. It makes enough bold assumptions to keep things interesting from a legacy standpoint, and it has, you guessed it, gossip. 

Sontag was a giant of writing and thought. She was willing to pit her opinions against other people considered to be giants of writing and thought, and if the stakes were a matter of human life (which was often the case), she was willing to defend them forcefully. So, she made enemies in a small, well-publicized, egotistical bubble. She was also a woman, Jewish, and ambiguous about her sexuality. 

You can see how Stewart would think this all makes for a good movie. Plus, she showed up in New York City in the late 1950s to do creative stuff, which alone might get some A24-ass studio to greenlight a story on the spot. Here’s a passage from the book:

Thanks to Jacob Taubes, she found a job at Commentary magazine. “That you are a woman is a difficulty but not an insurmountable difficulty,” he had told her in October. Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary who would die only a few months later, said “the difference between us and Partisan Review is that we admit we’re Jewish.” 

You get Michael Stuhlbarg to deliver that line and you’re already cooking with Oscar-bait. 

But this all sort of brings me back to the topic that I was originally going to write about before I got distracted by how cool she looks on the cover. The most important thing about Susan Sontag is her writing. A depiction of her writing, even a thorough biography contextualizing her writing, is not even remotely close to her writing. To read Sontag on cancer or photography, for example, is challenging, even laborious work. But it invites you to see those things with philosophical wonder and connect all Big Picture Topics to their past and their future and the urgency of which they are affecting things in the present. 

A movie about Susan Sontag, no matter how well executed, is almost exclusively brand awareness. It is intellectual property in a weirdly literal way. 

It’s also worth noting that you cannot fully connect the dots from a writer’s life and experiences to their work. Any given interaction in their life could bias them, sure. But we may never know in which way. Perhaps they are biased against an adversary, or they are fiercely overcompensating for that possibility. They don’t usually know themselves, and history has deemed her writing worthy without that knowledge. A biography like Moser’s somewhat understands that. A film can only hint at in a way that means nothing.

Salman Rushdie was a personal acquaintance of Sontag. I recently read his memoir about the assassination attempt on him. Something I was struck by is how comfortable he was demystifying himself as a person. It was jarring how much less of an all caps “INTELLECTUAL” I considered him after reading, because he gave me permission to stop seeing him that way. 

The beauty of that is not humility. It’s that it is an honoring of the work. Historically, Sontag is important, and I don’t mean to take that away. But her work takes you further than her life. 

If you were to read a biography of a musician, you might soundtrack the days or weeks you take to read it with their music, hoping those two experiences in concert with each other can at least make you feel like you understand the magic more deeply, even if you aren’t actually any closer. That’s how I’d recommend reading Sontag, with bits and essays by her in-between sections of the book. No need to line up her works with where you are in the book. Just insert some of her work into the experience and remind yourself of what this is all about. 

3 More Things You Can Read Today:

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You Might Now Know How Much The Vibraphone Can Do For You:

Giving someone three minutes of Milt Jackson is always a pleasure. If you’re carrying around a bias against the idea that the vibraphone is an artful instrument you need in your life, just know this song also features Thelonius Monk, which is someone whose name you probably do not hold such a bias against.