“The dauntingly erudite, strikingly handsome woman who became a star of the New York intelligentsia when barely thirty, after publishing the essay ‘Notes on Camp,’ and who went on to produce book after book of advanced criticism and fiction, is brought low in this biography.”[1] Such was the verdict of Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker last September.  “Most readers of this biography will find Sontag’s performance of her own ego more monstrous than comic,” wrote Michael Gorra last month in The New York Review of Books.^[2]  Vivian Gornick, writing in The New York Times in October, was willing at least to concede that Benjamin Moser’s biography of Susan Sontag “neither whitewashes nor rebukes its subject,” but then she faulted Moser for not loving Sontag, and this “poses a serious problem for his book.  A strong, vibrant, even mysterious flow of sympathy must exist between the writer and the subject—however unlovable that subject might be—in order that a remarkable biography be written.”^[3]

         Perusing these various reviews of Moser’s 705-page biography of Sontag, one gets the distinct impression of wagons being circled.  Book reviewers, especially those writing for New York publications, are not going to let some man to come along and besmirch the memory of a feminist heroine of the late twentieth century. 

         Gorra, an English professor at Smith College and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, charges that “Moser loses the writer in the personality,” adding “I finished his book feeling that I knew less than I should about the daily grind of being Susan Sontag—as opposed to the public staging of a persona with the same name.  Moser tells us that she wore a lot of scarves, didn’t exercise, like dim sum, and used speed for many years to help her meet deadlines.  Yet did she have a favorite restaurant?  How did she take her coffee, and where did she like to shop?”^[4]  Gorra might have made his case against Moser stronger if he had cited any literary biographies that have supplied that sort of intimate detail about a subject’s private life.  In any case, I doubt that knowing that Sontag liked cream in her coffee and shopped regularly at Bloomingdale’s (assuming that those were her preferences) would have anchored her biography in anything more substantial than the copious detail Moser provides about her various residences, relations with friends and lovers, travel, gossip, and personal hygiene.  Reading Gorra’s review of Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco, 2019), I couldn’t help thinking that he was desperately determined to find fault with it, otherwise why complain about not knowing how Sontag took her coffee? 

         Gorra admits that he was shocked to learn that Sontag, in the 1960s, briefly considered pursuing a doctorate, and, since she wasn’t good with languages, she persuaded a friend to take the German exam in her place.^[5]  If this was the only incident described in Moser’s biography that shocked Gorra, he has a peculiar set of sensibilities, for Moser also details how Sontag abandoned her son when he was an infant, publicly humiliated Annie Liebovitz in front of friends, betrayed intimacies, and relentlessly pursued and cultivated celebrities.

         Gorra complains that Moser’s “treatment of On Photography is sketchy at best,”^[6] and he clearly holds this collection of six essays as a work of genius, but has Gorra actually read it?  In one of those essays, “Shooting America,” which ran in The New York Review of Books in April 1974, Sontag wrote:

The mainstream of photographic activity has shown that Surrealist distortion and theatrics are unnecessary, if not actually redundant.  Surrealism lay at the heart of the photographic enterprise itself: in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.  The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naïve—the more surreal the photograph was likely to be.^[7]

               Sontag’s insistence that photography and surrealism are inextricably linked is one of her daring rhetorical gambits that doesn’t, when examined in the light of day, make much sense.  Is every picture of small children taken by doting relatives a window into the surreal?  In writing about Robert Frank’s photographs collected in The Americans, a truly stunning departure from conventional photojournalism of its day, Sontag argued that: “Any inventory of America is inevitably antiscientific, a delirious confusion of surreal objects, in which jukeboxes resemble coffins, in which the prevailing mood is sadness.”^[8]  Really?  And do jukeboxes not resemble coffins in Germany or in Frank’s native Switzerland? 

         Gorra admits that some of Sontag’s categorical statements may miss their mark, but, nevertheless, “they demand that you argue.  It hardly matters whether or not she’s right.”^[9]  Indeed?  Would he make the same allowance for careless exaggerations and foolish generalizations by, for example, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Norman Mailer?  I suspect not.  Sontag is given a Get Out of Jail Free card by her admirers because she is revered as the pioneer of literary feminism.  Evidently we have not yet reached the point at which her shortcomings can be acknowledged without detracting from her standing as a cultural icon. 

         Malcolm believes she has discovered the reason for Moser’s supposed animosity to his subject: his “exasperation with Sontag is fuelled by something that lies outside the problematic of biographical writing.  Midway through the biography, he drops the mask of neutral observer and reveals himself to be—you could almost say comes out as—an intellectual adversary of his subject.”^[10]  This catty comment—Moser resides in Utrecht with two other men—is fairly typical of the fusillade Malcolm has aimed at his biography.  Malcolm’s animus against Moser carries a personal resonance.  She asserts at one point that “Moser can barely contain his rage at Sontag for not coming out during the AIDS crisis.”^[11]   If there is rage to be encountered, however, it is Malcolm’s.  She admits, at one point, that Sontag’s journals “authenticate Moser’s dire portrait” and that his interviews with her “friends, lovers, family members, and employees deepen its livid hue,” but then she asks: “Why do people speak to biographers about their late famous friends?”^[12]  Malcolm evident wishes that fewer of Sontag’s friends and former lovers had agreed to be interviewed by Moser, which amounts to a desire to suppress the facts of Sontag’s life, particularly the less-than-pleasant aspects of it.  Apparently Malcolm would be better pleased by a sanitized version of the life, an attitude implied by the title of her article in The New Yorker: “Susan Sontag and the Unholy Practice of Biography.”

         This is the common theme of the three book reviews under consideration here: each of the reviewers takes Moser to task for telling us more about Susan Sontag than we really should know.  They regard his biography of Sontag much as Attorney General William Barr regards the Mueller report, with a desire to suppress and to censor. 

         Moser’s book, as I read it, is even-handed in the way it deals with Sontag’s sometimes quirky behavior, and he often bends over backward to be fair to her, as in his lengthy treatment of her truly heroic dedication to the people of Sarajevo during the long and costly siege to which the Serbs subjected it in the 1990s.  Sontag returned to the beleaguered city again and again, bringing food, medical supplies, and hope: “There, she put her body on the line, and bore witness, and earned universal respect; but none of that answered the difficult question she posed: of what she, either as an individual or as a symbol, could actually do to help.”^[13]  Moser also gave Sontag due credit for the splendid work she did, as president of PEN, to rally the literary community in the United States and abroad to the support of Salman Rushdie in 1989, after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him for his novel, The Satanic Verses, which was considered blasphemy against Islam.  Initially the response of most writers was equivocal, but then Sontag swung into action: “Within day, something changed.  ‘Whipped into line by Susan, almost all of them found their better selves,’ Rushdie wrote.”  Sontag summoned a virtual phalanx of American writers to stand with Rushdie, including Joan Didion, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Larry McMurtry, Robert Caro, and Edward Said.^[14]

         To be sure, Sontag was a difficult and sometimes exasperatingly quixotic person to deal with, almost as self-involved and indifferent to the reactions of others as another New Yorker of her day, Donald J. Trump.  Her inconsistent relations with her son, David Rieff, as documented by Moser, elicit sympathy for Rieff, and her vulgarity and cruelty in her public attacks on her lover, Annie Leibovitz, who generously supported her, are head-scratchingly perverse.  She sometimes cast a pall on social occasions by mercilessly ridiculing Leibovitz for her lack of intellectual polish.^[15]  

         Flaws in the characters of famous writers are nothing new.  Ernest Hemingway was no prize as a human being, and V.S. Naipaul was capable of physical violence against women, but Hemingway and Naipaul continue to attract readers and to stand among the foremost novelists of their time.  Thomas Jefferson’s misuse of Sally Hemings disgusts readers today, but his place in American history is assured.  Janet Malcolm, Michael Gorra, and Vivian Gornick should reconcile themselves to the inevitability of everything in Sontag’s life being exposed, sooner or later, to public scrutiny.  Her literary reputation will either stand or gradually erode, but her lies, mistreatment of lovers, betrayals of friendship, bad parenting, and egomania will neither buttress nor undermine that reputation.  Benjamin Moser’s meticulously researched and thorough life of Susan Sontag is a fully realized and exceedingly readable addition to literary biography, and it will withstand the calumny and pettiness of reviewers.