A Literary Diva Gets a Celebrity Bio

“In person she is like a goddess . . . simply larger than life. . . . Like Marilyn Monroe, Susan Sontag is a platonic figure.” This rather perfervid encomium comes from Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock’s introduction to their unauthorized biography of Susan Sontag. One is tempted to call it a book that begins in heroine worship and ends in desecration, but that is not quite so. Still, by wildly overstating their subject’s iconic status, the authors seem to feel they have provided justification for subjecting the object of their worship to a certain amount of demystification.

This biography, we’re told, will be “not just a rehearsal of what made Susan Sontag a writer but an analysis of what made her Susan Sontag.” What this turns out to mean is not an in-depth psychoanalytical probe in the manner of Leon Edel but a lot of “analysis” of the photographs of Sontag used on her dust jackets.

Of course, there’s more, though not so much as one might have hoped. The authors have pieced together a gossipy, rather scrappy account of Sontag’s life that draws on her published writings and interviews as well as their own interviews with some of her friends, enemies--and enemies who were formerly friends. (And from this biography, it seems as if the woman who Norman Podhoretz dubbed “the dark lady of American letters” must have more ex-friends than Podhoretz himself!) Certainly, there’s plenty of back-biting.

But in another way, the problem is that the authors have not gone far enough. For as Frances Kiernan’s recent biography of Mary McCarthy shows, it is possible to fashion a searching, well-rounded portrait based on interviews if you have amassed a broad and inclusive enough array of material.

This, in turn, generally depends (in the case of a subject still living) on having obtained his or her consent, as Rollyson and Paddock have not. It’s true, as they point out, that some of Sontag’s friends were willing to talk to them. But many, including her various lovers, evidently were not.

Rollyson and Paddock do a fair job of summarizing the course of Sontag’s thinking over the years on culture, art and politics. They also give plenty of space to her critics. Although Sontag’s pronouncements have engendered great admiration and greater controversy, it is sometimes hard to imagine what all the fuss was about.

The aesthetic credo set forth in her 1966 collection, “Against Interpretation,” is not only far less extreme than the dicta of a Foucault or a Derrida, but more moderate than the theories of Wilde, Pater, Mallarme or, for that matter, I.A. Richards.

“A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question,” declares Sontag in her essay “On Style.” “Art is not only about something; it is something.” This could have been written by any New Critic, by any poet from Wallace Stevens to Archibald MacLeish (“A poem must not mean, but be.”)

Is Sontag, as her critics and this biography seem to suggest, more style than substance? True, she has a penchant for the striking turn of phrase (she is, after all, a literary journalist, not a scholar), but she does take the trouble to qualify her pronouncements.

Her essay on Simone Weil, for example, concludes, “No one who loves life would wish to imitate her dedication to martyrdom . . . Yet so far as we love seriousness, as well as life, we are moved by it. . . . In this sense . . . some (but not all) insanity, some (but not all) unhealthiness, some (but not all) denials of life are . . . sanity-producing, health-creating, and life-enhancing.”

Sontag is also capable of changing her mind in the face of new realities. Former left-wing allies accuse her of having deserted them, but few conservatives have forgiven her trip to Hanoi. Gay critics accuse her of making more of her brief marriage to Philip Rieff than of her decades of lesbian affairs.

All this is noted by Rollyson and Paddock but only in the sketchiest way, rather than being explored in any depth. This is a biography that delivers a great deal less than it promises.