HUMANITIES, September/October 2014, Volume 35, Number 5 (Numbers 1-3).

1.

How to capture a life? A problem of biographical projects, especially those involving subjects who left behind multiple books and interviews and hours of film footage, is that ten edits of the same story will yield ten different lives. This raises a further question with which every biographer must contend, even for lives much less complex and ecstatic and varied than Susan Sontag’s: How much space should be given over to the messy details of the private life—the love affairs, the children, the fraught relationships with family—how much to the public life, and beyond that, how much to the environment and the era by which that life was shaped?

Nancy Kates’s new documentary film, Regarding Susan Sontag—a fascinating, moving, and often gorgeous entry into the canon of works produced about Sontag since her death—doesn’t neglect the time and the social forces that shaped Sontag’s life, but, for the most part, the narrative that emerges is deeply personal. It’s a close portrait of a woman who was, in the words of her son, “interested in everything”: Wittgenstein, but also sci-fi B movies; John Cage, but also Fred Astaire.

“She wanted to have everything at least three ways,” Christopher Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22,. . . and she wanted it voraciously: an evening of theater or cinema followed by a lengthy dinner at an intriguing new restaurant, with visitors from at least one new country, to be succeeded by very late-night conversation precisely so that an early start could be made in the morning.

Sontag was born in New York City in 1933, raised in various suburbs—on Long Island, near Tucson, the San Fernando Valley—and when she enrolled at Berkeley as a teenager, she felt she’d found home, standing in line and hearing Proust’s name pronounced correctly for the first time. When she recounts this on video decades later, you can still see the ecstasy of that moment in her face.

She transferred to the University of Chicago, where she married a professor whom she’d only known for ten days. She had a child, went to Oxford on a philosophy fellowship, divorced; fell in and out of love with women and men in Paris and New York; wrote novels, stage plays, and essays on subjects ranging from photography to illness to horror movies. She was brilliant, beautiful, and forceful. She established herself as a cultural critic and a public intellectual, and became excessively famous. By the time of her death—of cancer, in 2004—she had left an indelible and sometimes controversial mark on American culture.

2.

In the edition of the New Yorker that appeared a week after 9/11, the Talk of the Town section was given over to a number of short essays by prominent writers, Sontag among them, reflecting on the atrocity. The other writers offered subdued, anguished reflections on the horror of watching the attack unfold, on its aftermath. They wrote of human connections, of grief, of their shock and disorientation as they tried to find bearings in this baffling new world in which we’d all suddenly landed. Sontag, on the other hand, came out with knives drawn. “Where is the acknowledgement,” she wrote,

that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed super-power, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?

At a moment when the prevailing sentiment was grief, she’d already moved on to critiquing the language, and she came across as insensitive at best. An early clip in Regarding finds her defending her position on ABC, a representative of the Heritage Foundation interrupting and talking over her to explain that Sontag is “an offensive writer,” part of the “‘blame America first’ crowd,” whose “version of patriotism is ‘blame America, blame America.’”

When she eventually succeeds in getting a word in edgewise, she explains that her point in the New Yorker wasn’t that America was to blame, her point was that “this sort of build-up of moralistic words to describe this horrendous atrocity was not helping us to understand and reach an intelligent response, political and military, which I’m absolutely in favor of. I’m not a pacifist.”

It was an argument, in other words, for precision and intelligence in our use of language. In the cacophony of interruptions that follows, Kates cuts to an editorial that Sontag wrote as a teenager, in the North Hollywood High School newspaper:

The battle for peace will never be won by calling anyone whom we don’t like a Communist. If we do this, we shall some day realize that in the effort to preserve our Democratic way of life, we have thrown away its noblest feature: the right of every person to express his own opinion.

This is one of the great pleasures of Regarding, these glimpses of the early life, Kates’s grace in connecting these glimpses to the life and the career that followed. Peter Haidu, a scholar in medieval studies, remembers the teenaged Sontag well. “She sat me down on her bed,” he recalls, “and ran through the argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. She must have been fifteen.”

3.

It’s a given that Sontag was possessed of an extraordinary mind; a strength of Regarding is its depiction of an equally extraordinary will. She was who she was—Susan Sontag the icon, as opposed to, say, Susan Sontag the very-well-read-but-unpublished housewife—because she willed herself out of one life and into another. Then another, and another.

In one of the film’s most compelling interviews, shot in Sontag’s later years, a reporter pries gently into the early chronology: college at fifteen, marriage at seventeen, a child at nineteen. “These numbers suggest what?” she asks.

 Sontag replies:

Eagerness to grow up. I hated being a child. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. I wanted to stay up all night. . . . I wanted to talk to people. I wanted to meet people who were interested in what I was interested in.

I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. In Regarding, this problem seems as relevant to Sontag’s marriage as it was to her childhood. “Marriage,” she wrote in her journal, “is based on the principle of inertia.” An unfortunate conception of marriage for anyone, but particularly disastrous for a person whose internal equilibrium seemed to require constant motion. In 1957, Sontag left her husband and son in the United States—she made arrangements for five-year-old David to be cared for by her husband’s parents—and crossed the Atlantic to study philosophy at Oxford. “I think,” her sister Judith says of this decision, “she just wanted to do what she wanted to do. That’s really all there is to it.”

“She was constantly discovering things and becoming a new person,” the French scholar Alice Kaplan notes in the film, “and that was her essential avant-gardism. You can either suspect it or really, really admire it.”

Or both. It’s possible to admire it on one level and, on another, suspect a certain lack of attention to the effect of those reinventions on the people around her. “She was never able to know what goes on in another person,” her former girlfriend Eva Kollisch said. “I mean the sensitivity that we exercise in everyday life all the time, you know, like ‘what are you thinking, what are you feeling, where are you in this?’ Susan was not sensitive. She was not a sensitive person.”

But Kates’s depiction of Sontag’s decision to leave is nuanced. Sontag may have wanted to do what she wanted to do, but, as Alice Kaplan points out, American parenting in the mid fifties was very different from American parenting today. Some things that seem unfathomable now were less so back then, and vice versa. Moreover, the model of passing off one’s children to other people was a familiar arrangement: Susan and Judith had been raised by relatives until Susan was six and Judith was three, their parents being occupied by the fur-trading business in China.

Consider for a moment this passage from Jenny Offill’s exquisite recent novel, Dept. of Speculation, in which a married female writer considers the path not taken:

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

It is absolutely possible to be an artist and to be married. It’s difficult to be both an art monster, in Offill’s splendid phrasing, and a responsible spouse. And it seems a fairly safe assumption that being both an art monster and a wife would have been virtually impossible in the mid fifties.

Reflecting on the collapse of his marriage with Sontag, in a story that appeared in the New York Observer a year after her death, Philip Rieff said, “I think what I wanted was a large family and what she wanted was a large library.”