Has Old Skunk Head gone soft? America’s foremost writer, critic and cultural guerrilla has a new book out – an historical romance
Maureen Freely
In the Sixties she was the high priestess of the avant-garde, and America’s most Parisian intellectual. She took the French New Wave to New York and forced the American Old Wave to bow to its superior aesthetic. She could not write about the new art or the new cinema or the new music without striving for a superior vocabulary. She could not invent a new term without that term becoming the standard cultural lexicon. She was the one who made it witty to be camp. She sent an entire generation of photographers on “social safari”. She herself went on numerous political safaris – to oppose the wars in Vietnam, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, to fight for human rights in all those places and everywhere else, too.
Everywhere she went, she wore the sort of scruffy clothes that made you think she was in the middle of painting a house and had just dashed out for a pack of cigarettes. But no matter what she wore, she looked beautiful, glamorous, passionately committed — and terrifying.
Nothing could faze this woman. When she fell ill with cancer in the late Seventies, she refused to stop work, or even take time off to feel sorry about herself. Instead she wrote an extraordinary book called Illness as Metaphor in which she argued that it was very bad for your health to think about illness metaphorically. Years later, when she sat down to do her research for the sequel, Aids and its Metaphors, she found that her ideas had so influenced the earlier discussion of the epidemic that she felt like a plagiarist. But then she found a way to advance beyond her own metaphors. Yet again, her friends and associates shook their heads with admiration and wondered where it was she got her relentless energy.
Behind her back, her enemies derided her for her relentless arrogance. They nicknamed her “Old Skunk Head” – in reference to her famous lock of white hair – but she is unlikely to know this, as no one ever ever dared to use that nickname to her face.
They kept quiet, too, when she did that infamous “sixtysomething as sex kitten” photo-shoot for her companion, Annie Leibowitz (Sontag is now 67). It was only behind closed doors that they agreed kitten was not quite appropriate for a woman of her great height, and started referring to her as “the lynx'”.
But now she has done something that could destroy her mystique forever. She’s gone and written an historical romance, In America, that Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times calls a “banal, flat- footed narrative – a thoroughly conventional imitation of a thoroughly conventional 19th-century novel”. This is not her first work of fiction, and not her first historical romance. That came out eight years ago. It was about Nelson and his mistress. But it was still very, very brainy. Kakutani called it “enthralling – an encyclopaedic novel of ideas”. The Volcano Lover had so many twists and games that you could easily think Sontag had gone post-modern.
Certainly no one could say that about the new book. So, people are daring to ask:What is going on? Has she lost her touch, or was she always like this, and we were just too cowed to say so in public?
It is nice to know that there is still a place in the world where people argue about such things. Only in New York, you might say. Only in The New Yorker. In a recent issue, an old friend of Sontag, named Joan Acocella, comes out in passionate defence of Sontag’s artistic U-turn. She claims that, in spite of all those anti-trad essays that made her name, Sontag’s heart always did belong to Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot. What’s more, those essays made her miserable, as the form never allowed her to express her full nature.
“I was involved in an intense self- mortification,” Acocella quotes Sontag as saying. “Those essays aren’t just austere, they’re positively ascetic, as if I didn’t trust the sensuality of my imagination. I was afraid of getting lost. I just wanted to support things that were good, and that would be improving to people, and that was natural to me, because I always had a moralistic frame of mind.”
Acocella goes on to insist that Sontag was never really avant-garde. She was, at heart, always a child of the 19th century. This was partly to do with her odd and lonely childhood. She was born in 1933 and her father, whom she hardly knew, died when she was very young. Her mother, who was a rather serious secret drinker, hardly ever talked to her. She found her salvation in the Modern Library classics series. This only served to widen intellectual gap between her and her classmates. She’d read so much by the time she was 15 that her teacher decided that she should leave high school then and there and go straight to college.
She started at Berkeley and then transferred to the University of Chicago. By the age of 17, she was married to the scholar Phillip Rieff. She was 19 when she gave birth to David, her one and only child. And then it was off to graduate school at Harvard.
It was a good time to be there, thanks to the brain drain from Hitler’s Germany. The best year was the year Herbert Marcuse was their lodger. It was ideas, ideas, ideas, from dawn to dusk. Little David would toddle around saying “Hegel, Hegel, Hegel”. So when the marriage ended, and Sontag and son moved to New York, and she had her first real look at contemporary culture, it really did shock her. If she had something compelling and original to say about it, it was because she was looking at it through a sensibility that was still, Acocella and Sontag now claim, deeply rooted in European phil and lit.
And so they still are. According to this new gospel, it’s not Sontag that’s changed her tune. It’s the rest of the world. “It never occurred to me that all the stuff I had cherished, and all the people I had cared about in my university education, could be dethroned. All that would happen is that you would set up an annex – you know, a playhouse – in which you could study these naughty people, who challenged things. And you could have it all! Little did I know that the avant- garde transgressiveness of the Sixties was to become absolutely institutionalised and that most of the gods of high culture would be dethroned and mocked.”
In her view, she is still streets ahead of the rest of us. To write a conventional novel in this day and age, to dare to pay homage to the gods of high culture when everyone else is cutting them up into witty little pieces – this is really taking a big risk. To be sure, Sontag hedges her risks by never reading her book reviews. On and off the printed page she has little time for people who disagree with her.
She makes no secret of the fact that she considers herself and her son David to be intellectually superior to all other living beings. According to one long-time associate, she has not had a proper argument for years. This self-willed isolation has, this person believes, dulled her senses. People don’t argue with Sontag because life is already dangerous enough even when you are agreeing with her.
I had a taste of this myself about 10 years ago, when I was deputised to drive her and her son David around Miami. My first mistake was to apologise for the age and sorry state of my car. This made her snort in disgust. “Oh my God, what a stupid thing to say. Do you think someone like me cares about cars?”
My next mistake was to obey her when she commanded me to park in a space that was a little too tight. When she saw I was having trouble, she began to shriek, “Don’t tell me I am going to have to teach you to parallel park, too!” And then she tried, her shriek getting worse with my every mistake. It was “Go right! Go left! No, I said right! I mean, left!” Finally it was “This is just awful. Get out of the car! I’m going to have to have my son do this.”
Afterwards I got even by collecting other Sontag anecdotes. My favourite is the one where she is looking at an invitation to the premiSre of a little theatre production of one of her plays, trying to decide whether or not she should go. She asks herself: “Would Kafka do it? No. Would Proust do it? No. So fuck it.” She was not speaking ironically. She really does put herself on the same pedestal as Kafka, Proust, Mann, Elias Canetti, and George Eliot.
But this cannot be an easy place to live. It may be that she has no time for other people’s criticisms because she knows no one could set standards more punishing than the ones she sets herself. As one former friend said to me, she must be very lonely.
When she started out, she was one politically engaged intellectual among many. Now she’s the only one left, all the others having “thrown in the towel and joined low culture”. But she’s still soldiering on, still daring to look people straight in the face to say, “All my work says: Be serious, be passionate, wake up.”
There’s something rather admirable about her refusal to forget her fallen idols and change with the times. As wrong-headed and self-justifying as she is, she still deserves an “A” for heroic effort.