The Susan Sontag I Knew
'Humourless' is not an adjective which readily springs to mind about her.
The Devouring Mind by Kevin Power
An engrossing piece by Kevin Power in the new Dublin Review of Books, on a new book by Salmagundi editor Robert Boyers, based around his acquaintance with Susan Sontag and George Steiner.
While there is much to chew on here, I do take severe issue with the notion propounded by Boyers, via Power, that SS was ‘humourless’. E.g.:
‘Boyers once tried to get Sontag to talk about Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. She wouldn’t be drawn. Boyers writes: ‘Her sense of herself, and of what mattered and deserved to matter, required that she not further engage with those movies. Not venture in the direction of things apt to be unworthy.’ To be imprisoned by a self-flattering idea of taste, of seriousness: is this being ‘twice as alive as most of us’? Half as alive surely.’
As I argued in my review of an early Sontag biography by Daniel Schreiber, in the self-same DRB (nine years ago now, I notice to my shock), perhaps no other ’60s public intellectual did more than her to collapse the then still-standing distinction between high culture and popular culture. See the story about seeing Rock Around The Clock in 1956 changing her life.
https://drb.ie/articles/saved-by-rock-n-roll/
Power also indulges Boyers’ employment of the old trope of bookish intellectuals not really understanding people or relationships. E.g.:
‘One more way of being a critic: you can use works of art to think about society, that is, human relationships. Sontag was never really going to do that either.’
And, quoting Steiner:
‘All about us flourishes the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read short words or words of hatred and tawdriness but cannot grasp the meaning of language when it is in a condition of beauty or of truth.’ This is both still true and too simple. It encodes a fear of ordinary people that often finds expression, in members of the elite, as a passion for high standards, deep culture, all the rest of it. Now, as then, a besetting vice of intellectuals.’
The idea of complaints about intellectual snobs, or positing that certain lofty intellectuals do not understand ‘ordinary’ people – that is, the existence of an intellectual ‘elite’ – when emanating from those employed as academics on university campuses, really does stick in my craw.
Power does anticipate my criticism towards the end of his article: ‘It might be said in protest that I have understood the works of these two gifted critics as merely the epiphenomena of childhood unhappiness; and perhaps I have.’ Where would any of us be without personal pathology, indeed? But maybe SS simply thought that most psychoanalysis was, at best, ineffectual, and at worst, pernicious piffle. Maybe she thought that her own childhood wasn’t that interesting, or no more interesting than anyone else’s. Maybe she thought beyond herself. Or maybe that’s just the vulnerability of my own ‘False Self’ talking.
As for Steiner, perhaps he was a bit of a show-off, perhaps he was a bit of an academic stuffed-shirt – although a more versatile one than most. He did suffer the double whammy of being side-lined within the academy (jealousy?, petty politics?), while also being dissed by the kids, a fate to which I can somewhat relate.
Finally, Bowers’ book sounds to me – although I haven’t read it and probably won’t – as more akin to a gossipy cash-in, than a record of genuine friendship, much less a ‘serious’ engagement with the work of either critic.