Sontag, Susan

(b. 16 January 1933 in New York City; d. 28 December 2004 in New York City), critic, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, winner of the National Book Award in nonfiction and fiction, and an influential activist writer who was controversial for both her aesthetic and her political positions.

Sontag was the daughter of Jack Rosenblatt, a fur trader who died in China when Sontag was only five years old. Sontag’s mother, Mildred (Jacobson) Rosenblatt, helped in her husband’s business and then became a schoolteacher after his death. Mildred Rosenblatt moved her two daughters to Tucson, Arizona, after her husband’s death to seek a cure for Sontag’s asthma. A precocious child, Sontag began school in the third grade. When her mother married Captain Nathan Sontag, a recently retired U.S. Army officer, twelve-year-old Susan and her sister took his last name as their own. The family then moved to Southern California, settling in Canoga Park. Sontag attended North Hollywood High School, graduating in 1948 at age fifteen.

Sontag wanted to attend the University of Chicago, but her mother worried about sending her young daughter so far away from home and to a city campus well known for its radical atmosphere. Mildred persuaded Sontag to attend the University of California, Berkeley. But after a semester Sontag transferred to the University of Chicago, earning a BA (1951) in little more than two years.

While at the University of Chicago, the seventeen-year-old Sontag married the sociology instructor Philip Rieff in 1950. Sontag said little about these early years, although they are treated obliquely in her short story collection, I, Etcetera (1978). While Rieff pursued his academic career, Sontag earned an MA in English in 1954 and one in philosophy in 1955, both from Harvard University, and began teaching at the University of Connecticut (1953–1954), the City College of New York (1959–1960), Columbia University (1960–1964), and other schools. In 1952 she gave birth to a son, David Rieff, who would become a noted journalist. Sontag also did graduate work at Saint Anne’s College of the University of Oxford in 1957.

Divorced from Philip Rieff in 1958, Sontag embarked on a series of romantic relationships with other women, including the playwright Irene Maria Fornes, the dancer Lucinda Childs, and much later the photographer Annie Leibovitz. Although these liaisons were generally known in New York City, where she lived much of the time, she did not publicly comment on them until the publication of Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon in 2000. Also in the late 1950s she began work on a first novel, The Benefactor: A Novel (1963). This work received mixed reviews; some critics deemed it derivative of the French “new novel” (nouveau roman, a 1950s variety of the postmodern novel). With Death Kit (1967) she tried once more to establish her presence as a novelist, but few critics regarded this book as evidence of great talent.

“Notes on ‘Camp,’” part of Sontag’s provocative essay collection Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (1966), showed off Sontag’s range and her claims to originality. Although the word “camp” had been described in the British writer Christopher Isherwood’s “lazy two-page sketch,” Sontag offered a taxonomy of the term. Camp was corny and flamboyant, extravagant and stylized. The camp sensibility constituted an aesthetic—the admiration of style in and for itself. Figures such as the actresses Greta Garbo, Jayne Mansfield, and Mae West and the “public manner of rhetoric of de Gaulle” were “pure camp,” Sontag argued. Camp was important, Sontag concluded, because it cut across all categories of art and formed one sensibility that is “pluralistic,” one that appreciates the “beauty of a machine” as much as a painting by the artist Jasper Johns, a film by the director Jean-Luc Godard, or a song by the Beatles.

Time magazine took Sontag up as the intellectual flavor of the week, and her fame grew. She was photographed by the best photographers of her day, and her jacket photographs had the aura of French film noir. Her status as pop icon was singled out in Contemporary Biography, which called her “The Natalie Wood of the U.S. avant garde.”

During the Vietnam War, Sontag took an activist, dissident stance, writing long essays like “Trip to Hanoi” (1969), which reflected her shame over being part of an American empire she viewed as destroying the hearts and minds of the very people the U.S. administration wished to win over. Whereas Sontag’s literary and cultural essays were sophisticated and nuanced, her political writings were strident, strewn with epithets and calls to action like “Viva Fidel!” Although she later recanted this simpleminded leftism, she was never able to complete the political essay that was meant to answer her critics. Having abandoned the Left, she had nowhere to go and took refuge in dismissing political labeling.

On Photography (1977) is arguably Sontag’s greatest contribution to American literature. Her first essay, “In Plato’s Cave,” is a kind of précis for the book. She plays with the philosopher’s fable of knowledge: the setting of a cave in which the only knowledge possible is what is seen in the reflections on a wall. That is to say, human knowledge of the world is secondhand, a reflection of the truth, not truth itself—a copy, not the original. Saint Paul’s statement that we see as through a glass darkly constitutes a similar comment on the human inability to see clearly and to grasp the whole of existence, let alone the divinity of God (according to Saint Paul) or the idea (perfect world of ideas) posited by Plato. Thus Sontag’s opening sentence carries moral, aesthetic, and almost religious connotations: “Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” Photographs, which can look so real, so much a part of the world, are deceptive, Sontag cautions. Whereas photography seems a way to collect and to encompass the world, it is also a way of fragmenting it into a series of shots—images that have no narrative thread. Instead of integrating the world, photographs atomize it. On Photography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1978).

In the mid-1970s Sontag was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. She sought experimental treatment in France, including a two-and-one-half-year course of chemotherapy after a double mastectomy. She did not write directly about this heroic struggle but instead published Illness as Metaphor (1978), perhaps her most influential and acclaimed book. She boldly attacked the mystique surrounding sickness. She argued for the patient’s right to seek out aggressive treatment and second opinions and above all to treat illness as just that—not a psychological malady that the patient was somehow responsible for, but an illness that could be treated openly without shame. As a result of Sontag’s book patients began exerting more control over their medical conditions, and medical schools assigned her book as a primer on how to deal with patients and their illnesses.

As president of PEN American Center (1987–1989), Sontag campaigned tirelessly for the writer Salman Rushdie when a fatwa (proclamation calling for his death) put his life in danger. She remained active throughout her career, working to save the lives of writers imprisoned unjustly or faced with execution. In 1990 Sontag was awarded a five-year MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

In the late 1980s Sontag turned her attention away from essay writing and toward fiction, publishing the best-selling The Volcano Lover: A Romance in 1992. This historical novel about the British naval hero Admiral Lord Nelson, the ambassador Sir William Hamilton, and his wife, Emma, won Sontag a new generation of readers and was widely praised for a fluency and accessibility absent from her earlier fiction. Her final novel, In America: A Novel (2000), a story of an emigrant Polish actress and her life in Anaheim, California, received far less critical praise but earned her a National Book Award.

Sontag maintained her political activism to the end of her life. She supported U.S. involvement in the Balkans—indeed, she risked her own life directing a production of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (translated 1954) in Sarajevo even as the city was being shelled. But she opposed the second Iraq War, arguing that America’s vital security interests were not threatened by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Sontag died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, New York, and is buried in the Cimetiere de Montparnasse in Paris, France. She had been suffering from acute myelogenous leukemia and complications of chemotherapy and radiation stemming from the uterine cancer that afflicted her in the late 1990s.

Sontag’s supporters hailed her eclecticism and saw her work as bridging the gap between popular and elite culture. Whereas an earlier generation of critics worried that mass culture would inundate and drive out the highest art, Sontag seemed to embrace all forms of art. Later, when college courses made popular culture a legitimate discipline of study and television seemed to obliterate much of the audience for high culture, Sontag retreated to a culturally conservative position barely distinguishable from that of the nineteenth-century writer and critic Matthew Arnold, a figure whom she had once highhandedly dismissed.

Sontag’s model of the intellectual was the Romanian philosopher Emil M. Cioran. Her essay on his work, which appeared in her influential second essay collection, Styles of Radical Will (1969), was titled “Thinking against Oneself”—an apt phrase for Cioran’s neo-Hegelian notion that, in Sontag’s words, “It is the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.” Contradictions were almost a matter of pride with her, not a legacy to live down.

The University of California, Los Angeles, houses an extensive collection of Sontag’s papers, including correspondence and manuscripts. The only full-length biography is by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon (2000). There are several introductory studies of Sontag and her career, including Sohnya Sayres, Susan Sontag: The Elegaic Modernist (1990); Liam Kennedy, Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995); and Carl Rollyson, Reading Susan Sontag (2001). Sontag’s interviews are collected in Leland Poague, ed., Conversations with Susan Sontag (1995). A helpful research tool is Leland Poague and Kathy A. Parsons, Susan Sontag: An Annotated Bibliography, 1948–1992 (2000). More advanced and speculative studies include Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael: Opposites Attract Me (2004), and Carl Rollyson, Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag (2005). An obituary is in the New York Times (29 Dec. 2004).

Carl Rollyson