OK, I'll admit that until I read Benjamin Moser's superb if somewhat controversial biography I was more intrigued by Susan Sontag's skunk hair-do than impressed by her erudition. Like many people, I knew she was the iconic figure of the 60s who defined camp but I didn't appreciate how fully she inhabited the zeitgeist of the last half of the 20th century. For starters, she and Andy Warhol fought to a draw in a peculiar cultural battle of the bands--Depth vs. Surface--but Sontag's biographer tells the much better story, hands down.
"If praise and prosperity brought out the worst in her, oppression and destitution brought out the best. If she could be haughty in New York she was kind in Sarajevo. 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."
Moser's seminal insights may be drawn from pop psychology--a life lived as both a child of an alcoholic and a closeted lesbian--but they also illuminate her personality in a way that Blake Gopnick fails to do in Warhol. Paradoxically, perhaps because I knew so little about Sontag, I felt that I actually got to know her much better than Warhol even though the visual artist was completely open about his sexuality.
The two bios got me thinking: somebody should write a play about the two of them. Call it The Cipher and the Diva.
"[The figure of the diva] dramatized the contrast between the person and the aestheticized person, between reality and dream: Sontag’s great theme. The diva is the dream of others. They fantasize about her, long to possess her, idealize her beauty, worship her genius, envy her wealth and fame. She is the product of a collective will – a product, like literary or political fictions, with a reality of its own."
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