When asked what she was best known for, Susan Sontag, the formidable 20th-century public intellectual, essayist, novelist and political activist, often told people, with just a hint of irony: the white streak in her dark hair.
Sontag, not typically one to downplay her literary achievements or to emphasise her physical attributes, probably got that right. To put it another way, she became better known for her public persona—what the biographer Benjamin Moser likes to call “Susan Sontag in quotation marks”—than for the impressive body of written work that is her legacy.
Moser spent seven years writing Sontag, an 800-page tome that traces the arc of Sontag’s life from precocious Susan Lee Rosenblatt, born in 1933, to a shorthand cultural symbol. He mines the tragic, comic and complex forces that coincided to create Sontag the icon, as well as all the trademarks of her persona, such as that skunk-do.
While undergoing her first chemotherapy treatment for cancer in 1975 (the disease from which she would ultimately die in 2004, at 71), Sontag didn’t lose her hair, but she did go completely gray. Shortly thereafter, she visited Hawaii to see her mother, Mildred, who enlisted a hairdresser friend as part of, Moser writes, “her perennial campaign to groom her daughter—‘get Susan to dress better, wear makeup.’”
The stylist dyed all but one stripe of Sontag’s hair black. The result was so emblematic of Sontag, Moser tells us, that Saturday Night Live even had a wig that resembled it in its wardrobe department—“a comic synecdoche for the New York intellectual.”
In a move characteristic of Moser’s exhaustive approach (established in Why This World, his acclaimed 2009 biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector), he tracked down the hairdresser who came up with the look, Paul Brown, one of the approximately 600 people Moser interviewed, many of them more than once. He also found a photo of Sontag, immediately post-makeover, wearing a kind of negligee and looking like a character out of the TV show Designing Women.
That is not to suggest that Moser’s project is in any way superficial. Hefty both in size and in interpretive bandwidth, Sontag is a landmark biography, the first major reintroduction of an incomparable literary heavyweight to the public since her death 15 years ago. Moser takes a deep dive into Sontag’s personal life and her work, exploring published and unpublished writings, and lingering frequently to analyse—and occasionally psychoanalyse—Sontag’s emotional, intellectual and social influences.
Sontag is an episodic journey of a life and a body of critical work that uncannily intersect with historical events of the 20th century, from the Vietnam War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the emergence of AIDS and the siege of Sarajevo. Moser explores Sontag’s childhood with a vainglorious single mother, her early marriage and motherhood; her famous affairs, with Robert Kennedy, the artist Jasper Johns, the playwright María Irene Fornés and the choreographer Lucinda Childs; as well as her struggles to maintain connection to those she truly loved, such as her son, David Rieff, and the photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom she had a long-term relationship that she often publicly denied.
The Sontag estate gave Moser unprecedented access to the author’s archives, held at the University of California, Los Angeles, which include more than 100 journals, thousands of letters, family photographs, draft manuscripts and even her personal computer.
“She was at the intersection of everything, and everyone, everywhere,” Moser said, during an interview in the sunny atrium of his 17th-century home in Utrecht, the Netherlands. “She’s like the San Andreas fault, where everything just comes together; politics or culture or sexuality or art, she was someone who was always right there. So the question was: Where do you start with that?”
The book was originally sold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux, but Moser said he moved it to Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, midway through the project.
“Susan and FSG were so deeply connected throughout her career,” Moser explained in an email. “I thought it was important to give this book a little space to breathe outside of that relationship.” Jeff Seroy, senior vice president of publicity at FSG, said in an email that the switch was “a mutual decision,” and declined to comment further.
Despite Sontag’s Zelig-like cultural status, said Denise Oswald, executive editor of Ecco, who published the biography Tuesday, “the reality is that people knew very little about her personal life, and so the detail and granularity with which Ben delved into that was incredibly necessary.”
Sontag’s sister, Judith Zwick, allowed Moser to look at documents and other personal memorabilia in her possession. “Ben was trying to do something complete and something very true,” she said. “I don’t think I ever once said ‘off the record’ to him. I always felt very comfortable with him.”
Moser is fascinated by the dichotomy between the public Sontag, seemingly unflappable and uncompromising, and the private woman who suffered from a “terrible sense of inadequacy,” whose “incapacity for daily living was excruciating for herself and others.”
He explores that duality, and Sontag’s own awareness of how hard she had to work to maintain the Sontag people wanted her to be. In the late 1980s, when she hired the literary agent Andrew Wylie, she asked him to take a role in the planning of her cumbersome schedule.
According to Wylie, “she explicitly asked for help with Sontag-as-metaphor,” Moser writes in the book. “She needed, in other words, to delegate the demands of her public role in order to concentrate on her writing. She was ‘bursting’ to work on a novel, ‘but I can’t because of this Susan Sontag thing.’”
© 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES