Furious Permissions: For Susan Sontag, style was nourishment

254 o find herself conferring approval was Susan Sontag’s natural state as a writer. Leave aside her personal reputation , deserved and undeserved, for harsh or peremptory judgment, and you have a critic—if that is the word—whose best work was essentially, and unusually, celebratory. By “best work” I mean the essays of the 1960s and 1970s, an archipelago of stars that outshines all the later essays and her fiction. Of course, the party to which Sontag invited us was sometimes austerely toned, as in her stentorian aphorisms concerning the extravagant aesthetics of Camp. Or it was so densely populated as to seem oppressive; “The Aesthetics of Silence,” for example, with its noisy corralling of Furious Permissions For Susan Sontag, style was nourishment Brian Dillon books T FURIOUS PERMISSIONS | 255 Wittgenstein, Cage, Beckett, Johns, Burroughs, McLuhan, et very much al. But when she wrote about one artist, writer, or thinker, Sontag’s essays could sound, though no less complex, a good deal more unified, synthesizing, even lyrical. It’s in these pieces—on the likes of Simone Weil, E. M. Cioran, Elias Canetti—that you start to get a sense of what Sontag thought a writing life could or should be like: its rigors and its lures. In 1978, she spent several months writing “Under the Sign of Saturn,” an essay on Walter Benjamin for The New York Review of Books. Sontag constellates Benjamin’s diverse writings around the dark sun of melancholia—his suicide too, of course. She has a lot to say, in this vein, about her subject’s love of details and fragments, his elaboration of textual and intellectual patterns that swiftly fall apart: the definitively unfinished Arcades Project, or a famously misplaced map of his own life, drawn at a café table in Paris. Returning to her essay recently, I was struck by the qualities she most obviously admires and identifies with in Benjamin: his work ethic and stamina, the way he committed himself to vacillation and ambiguity, his precarious life as a freelance intellectual—and his own refusal of polemics in favor of what he called “the fullness of concentrated positivity.” “Under the Sign of Saturn” is home also to one of Sontag’s most lasting, and cryptic, aphorisms: “One cannot use the life to interpret the work. But one can use the work to interpret the life.” A neatly chiasmic assertion, for sure, and a compelling one for any critic who does not wish to give up on the idea that art and life are intimately convolved. But what does the second sentence really mean? And how would you know as a critic (or biographer) when you were doing it, and not the other thing? Which one is Sontag engaged in when she reads Benjamin’s vastly productive, painful span in terms of his conception of melancholia? How to escape a circular track of thought? I thought often about those two sentences from “Under the Sign of Saturn” while reading Benjamin Moser’s sedulously researched but sometimes obtuse biography. Here is a Life of dogged and widely canvassed detail—Moser interviewed more than 300 of Sontag’s relatives, friends, lovers, allies, and enemies— whose organizing, argumentative principles are intended to rhyme with guiding concepts or metaphors in Sontag’s writing. Chief among these, as it happens, are idea and image themselves. Time and again Moser tells us that Sontag struggled to know if intellectual abstractions, figural language, and actual images were telling her the truth, or were a treacherous appliqué on monstrous reality. If this seems a crude distinction, it’s one Moser forces onto her life, which appears to him clearly to divide into Sontag the intellectual icon, on the one hand, and “Sue,” an emotional disaster and petty tyrant, on the other. “To a divided world, she brought a divided self.” It’s a simplification too far—of work, of life, how they will or won’t fit together. hers was a life that began with distance and catastrophe. Susan Rosenblatt was born in New York in 1933. Her parents, Jack and Mildred, ran a fur trading business in China and were frequently absent. Early in 1939, Mildred returned from one...