[Paleopsych] LRB: (Sontag) Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan
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Terry Castle: Desperately Seeking Susan
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/print/cast01_.html
Terry Castle
A few weeks ago I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag
into my screensaver file: a tiny head shot clipped from Newsweek; two
that had appeared in the New York Times; another printed alongside
Allan Gurganus's obituary in the Advocate, a glossy American gay and
lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom
stars and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I
could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful
photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s,
around the time of I, Et Cetera. She's wearing a thin grey turtleneck
and lies on her back - arms up, head resting on her clasped hands and
her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame.
There's a slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing which I like:
very true to life. Every few hours now she floats up onscreen in this
digitised format, supine, sleek and flat-chested.
No doubt hundreds (thousands?) of people knew Susan Sontag better than
I did. For ten years ours was an on-again, off-again, semi-friendship,
constricted by role-playing and shot through in the end with mutual
irritation. Over the years I laboured to hide my growing disillusion,
especially during my last ill-fated visit to New York, when she
regaled me - for the umpteenth time - about the siege of Sarajevo, the
falling bombs, and how the pitiful Joan Baez had been too terrified to
come out of her hotel room. Sontag flapped her arms and shook her big
mannish hair - inevitably described in the press as a `mane' -
contemptuously. That woman is a fake! She tried to fly back to
California the next day! I was there for months. Through all of the
bombardment, of course, Terry. Then she ruminated. Had I ever met
Baez? Was she a secret lesbian? I confessed that I'd once waited in
line behind the folk singer at my cash machine (Baez lives near
Stanford) and had taken the opportunity to inspect the hairs on the
back of her neck. Sontag, who sensed a rival, considered this
non-event for a moment, but after further inquiries, was reassured
that I, her forty-something slave girl from San Francisco, still
preferred her to Ms Diamonds and Rust.
At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame
Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge - or possibly Stalin and Malenkov.
Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. Whenever she came
to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her
female aide-de-camp: a one-woman posse, ready to drop anything at a
phone call (including the classes I was supposed to be teaching at
Stanford) and drive her around to various Tower record stores and dim
sum restaurants. Most important, I became adept at clucking
sympathetically at her constant kvetching: about the stupidity and
philistinism of whatever local sap was paying for her lecture trip,
how no one had yet appreciated the true worth of her novel The Volcano
Lover, how you couldn't find a decent dry cleaner in downtown San
Francisco etc, etc.
True - from my point of view - it had all begun extraordinarily well.
Even now I have to confess that, early on, Sontag gave me a couple of
the sweetest (not to mention most amusing) moments of my adult life.
The first came one grey magical morning at Stanford in 1996, when
after several hours of slogging away on student papers, I opened a
strange manila envelope that had come for me, with a New York return
address. The contents - a brief fan letter about a piece I'd written
on Charlotte Brontë and a flamboyantly inscribed paperback copy of her
play, Alice in Bed (`from Susan') - made me dizzy with ecstasy. Having
idolised Sontag literally for decades - I'd first read `Notes on Camp'
as an exceedingly arch nine-year-old - I felt as if Pallas Athene
herself had suddenly materialised and offered me a cup of ambrosia. (O
great Susan! Most august Goddess of Female Intellect!) I zoomed
around, showing the note to various pals. To this day, when I replay
it in my mind, I still get a weird toxic jolt of adolescent joy - like
taking a big hit of Crazy Glue vapours out of a paper bag.
Things proceeded swiftly in our honeymoon phase. Sontag, it turned
out, was coming to Stanford for a writer-in-residence stint that
spring and the first morning after her arrival abruptly summoned me to
take her out to breakfast. The alacrity with which I drove the forty
miles down from San Francisco - trying not to get flustered but
panting a bit at the wheel nonetheless - set the pattern of our days.
We made the first of several madcap car trips around Palo Alto and the
Stanford foothills. While I drove, often somewhat erratically, she
would alternate between loud complaints - about her faculty club
accommodation, the bad food at the Humanities Center, the `dreariness'
of my Stanford colleagues (`Terry, don't you loathe academics as much
as I do? How can you abide it?') - and her Considered Views on
Everything (`Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas.
I told Andrew Porter he was right - they are the greatest of musical
masterpieces'). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first
visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.
The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the
great comic episode in this brief golden period. We were walking down
University Avenue, Palo Alto's twee, boutique-crammed main drag, on
our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her trademark
intellectual-diva outfit: voluminous black top and black silky slacks,
accessorised with a number of exotic, billowy scarves. These she
constantly adjusted or flung back imperiously over one shoulder,
stopping now and then to puff on a cigarette or expel a series of
phlegmy coughs. (The famous Sontag `look' always put me in mind of the
stage direction in Blithe Spirit: `Enter Madame Arcati, wearing
barbaric jewellery.') Somewhat incongruously, she had completed her
ensemble with a pair of pristine, startlingly white tennis shoes.
These made her feet seem comically huge, like Bugs Bunny's. I
half-expected her to bounce several feet up and down in the air
whenever she took a step, like one of those people who have shoes made
of `Flubber' in the old Fred McMurray movie.
She'd been telling me about the siege and how a Yugoslav woman she had
taken shelter with had asked her for her autograph, even as bombs fell
around them. She relished the woman's obvious intelligence (`Of
course, Terry, she'd read The Volcano Lover, and like all Europeans,
admired it tremendously') and her own sangfroid. Then she stopped
abruptly and asked, grim-faced, if I'd ever had to evade sniper fire.
I said, no, unfortunately not. Lickety-split she was off - dashing in
a feverish crouch from one boutique doorway to the next, white tennis
shoes a blur, all the way down the street to Restoration Hardware and
the Baskin-Robbins store. Five or six perplexed Palo Altans stopped to
watch as she bobbed zanily in and out, ducking her head, pointing at
imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at me to follow.
No one, clearly, knew who she was, though several of them looked as if
they thought they should know who she was.
In those early days, I felt like an intellectual autodidact facing the
greatest challenge of her career: the Autodidact of all Autodidacts.
The quizzing was relentless. Had I read Robert Walser? (Ooooh errrg
blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I'm ashamed to say . . .) Had I
read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! - Yes, I have! `Wittgenstein's Nephew'!
Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! - dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for
a while at least, that I had yet to be contaminated by the shocking
intellectual mediocrity surrounding me at Stanford U. This exemption
from idiocy was due mainly, I think, to the fact that I could hold my
own with her in the music-appreciation department. Trading CDs and
recommendations - in a peculiar, masculine, trainspotting fashion -
later became a part of our fragile bond. I scored a coup one time with
some obscure Busoni arrangements she'd not heard of (though she
assured me that `she had, of course, known the pianist' - the late
Paul Jacobs - `very well'); but I almost came a cropper when I
confessed I had never listened to Janácek's The Excursions of Mr
Broucek. She gave me a surprised look, then explained, somewhat
loftily, that I owed it to myself, as a `cultivated person', to become
acquainted with it. (`I adore Janácek's sound world.') A recording of
the opera appeared soon after in the mail - so I knew I'd been
forgiven - but after listening to it once I couldn't really get
anywhere with it. (It tends to go on a bit - in the same somewhat
exhausting Eastern European way I now associate with Sontag herself.)
The discs are still on my shelf. Given their exalted provenance I
can't bear to unload them at the used CD shop in my neighbourhood.
And she also flirted - in a coquettish, discombobulating, yet
unmistakable fashion. She told me she had read my book, The
Apparitional Lesbian, and `agreed with me entirely' about Henry James
and The Bostonians. She made me describe at length how I'd met my then
girlfriend. (`She wrote you a letter! And you answered? Terry, I'm
amazed! I get those letters all the time, but I would never answer
one! Of course, Terry, I'm stunned!') Though I was far too cowed to
ask her directly about her own love life, she would reveal the
occasional titbit from her legendary past, then give me a playful,
almost girlish look. (`Of course, Terry, everyone said Jeanne Moreau
and I were lovers, but you know, we were just good friends.') My
apotheosis as tease-target came the night of her big speech in Kresge
Auditorium. She had begun by reprimanding those in the audience who
failed to consider her one of the `essential' modern novelists, then
read a seemingly interminable section of what was to become In
America. (Has any other major literary figure written such an
excruciatingly turgid book?) At the end, as the audience gave way to
enormous, relieved clapping - thank God that's over - she made a
beeline towards me. Sideswiping the smiling president of Stanford and
an eager throng of autograph-seekers, she elbowed her way towards me,
enveloped me rakishly in her arms and said very loudly: `Terry, we've
got to stop meeting like this.' She seemed to think the line hilarious
and chortled heartily. I felt at once exalted, dopey and mortified,
like a plump teenage boy getting a hard-on in front of everybody.
Though otherwise respectful, Allan Gurganus (in the Advocate obit)
takes Sontag to task for never having come out publicly as a lesbian:
`My only wish about Sontag is that she had bothered to weather what
the rest of us daily endure. The disparity between her professed
fearlessness and her actual self-protective closetedness strikes a
questioning footnote that is the one blot on her otherwise brilliant
career.'
I have to say I could never figure her out on this touchy subject -
though we did talk about it. Her usual line (indignant and aggrieved)
was that she didn't believe in `labels' and that if anything she was
bisexual. She raged about a married couple who were following her from
city to city and would subsequently publish a tell-all biography of
her in 2000. Horrifyingly enough, she'd learned, the despicable pair
were planning to include photographs of her with various celebrated
female companions. Obviously, both needed to be consigned to Dante's
Inferno, to roast in the flames in perpetuity with the Unbaptised
Babies, Usurers and Makers of False Oaths. I struggled to keep a poker
face during these rants, but couldn't help thinking that Dante should
have devised a whole circle specifically for such malefactors: the
Outers of Sontag.
At other times she was less vehement, and would assume a dreamy,
George Sand-in-the-1840s look. `I've loved men, Terry; I've loved
women . . .' she would begin, with a deep sigh. What did the sex of
the person matter, after all? Think of Sand herself with Chopin and
Marie Dorval. Or Tsvetaeva, perhaps, with Mandelstam and Sophia
Parnok. In Paris, all the elegant married ladies had mistresses. And
yet in some way I felt the subject of female homosexuality - and
whether she owed the world a statement on it - was an unresolved one
for her. Later in our friendship, the topic seemed to become an
awkward obsession, especially as I came closer to finishing up an
anthology of lesbian-themed literature I'd been working on for several
years. She frequently suggested things she thought I should include:
most interestingly, perhaps, her favourite steamy love scene from
Patricia Highsmith's 1952 lesbian romance novel The Price of Salt. As
far as Sontag was concerned, Highsmith's dykey little potboiler -
published originally under a pseudonym - was right up there with
Buddenbrooks and The Man without Qualities. Something in the story -
about a gifted (yet insecure) young woman who moves to Manhattan in
the early 1950s to become a theatre designer and ends up falling
rapturously in love with a glamorous, outré older woman - must have
once struck a chord: Sontag seemed to dote on it.
And invariably she would probe for sapphic gossip - sometimes about
opera singers and pop stars, sometimes about other writers. Was it
true what everyone said about Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne during
the rehearsals for Norma? What about June Anderson? And Jessye Norman?
Or Lucia Popp, for that matter? (`Of course, Terry, the perfect Queen
of the Night.') Did I think Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy had had an
affair? What was Adrienne Rich's girlfriend like? When was somebody
ever going to spill the beans on Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen?
Was there some way, I wonder now, that she wanted me to absolve her?
Was the fact that she never mentioned, on any of the occasions we
talked, her equally prominent female companion - they lived in the
same Manhattan building - a sign of grande dame sophistication or some
sort of weird test of my character? (Actually I did hear her say her
name once; when someone at an otherwise fairly staid farewell dinner
gave Sontag a vulgar present at the end of her Stanford visit - a book
of glossy photos of the campy 1950s pin-up, Bettie Page - she said:
`I'll have to show these to Annie.')
I was never quite sure what she wanted. And besides, whatever it was,
after a while she stopped wanting it. I visited her several times in
New York City and even got invited to the London Terrace penthouse to
see the famous book collection. (`Of course, Terry, mine is the
greatest library in private hands in the world.') I tried not to gape
at the Brice Mardens stacked up against the wall and enthused
appropriately when she showed me prized items, such as Beckford's own
annotated copy of Vathek. We would go on little culture jaunts. Once
she took me to the Strand bookstore (the clerk said, `Hi, Susan' in
enviably blasé tones); another time she invited me to a film festival
she was curating at the Japan Society. But there were also little
danger signals, ominous hints that she was tiring of me. One day in
the Village, after having insisted on buying me a double-decker
ice-cream cone, she suddenly vanished, even as I, tongue moronically
extruded, was still licking away. I turned around in bewilderment and
saw her black-clad form piling, without farewell, into a yellow cab.
And the last two times I saw her I managed to blow it - horrendously -
both times. The first debacle occurred after one of the films at the
Japan Society. I'd been hanging nervously around in the lobby, like a
groupie, waiting for her: Sontag yanked me into a taxi with her and an
art curator she knew named Klaus. (He was hip and bald and dressed in
the sort of all-black outfit worn by the fictional German talk-show
host, Dieter Sprocket, on the old Saturday Night Live.) With great
excitement she explained she was taking me out for `a real New York
evening' - to a dinner party being hosted by Marina Abramovic, the
performance artist, at her loft in Soho. Abramovic had recently been
in the news for having lived for 12 days, stark naked, on an exposed
wooden platform - fitted with shower and toilet - in the window of the
Sean Kelly Gallery. She lived on whatever food spectators donated and
never spoke during the entire 12 days. I guess it had all been pretty
mesmerising: my friend Nancy happened to be there once when Abramovic
took a shower; and one of Nancy's friends hit the jackpot - she got to
watch the artist have a bowel movement.
Abramovic - plus hunky sculptor boyfriend - lived in a huge, virtually
empty loft, the sole furnishings being a dining table and chairs in
the very centre of the room and a spindly old stereo from the 1960s.
The space was probably a hundred feet on either side - `major real
estate, of course', as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved
using Vanity Fair-ish clichés.) She and Abramovic smothered one
another in hugs and kisses. I meanwhile blanched in fright: I'd just
caught sight of two of the other guests, who, alarmingly enough,
turned out to be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed (O great rock god
of my twenties) stood morosely by himself, humming, doing little dance
steps and playing air guitar. Periodically he glared at everyone -
including me - with apparent hatred. Anderson - elfin spikes of hair
perfectly gelled - was chatting up an Italian man from the Guggenheim,
the man's trophy wife and the freakish-looking lead singer from the
cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner. The last-mentioned had just come back
from performing at the Pompidou Centre and wore booties and tights, a
psychedelic shawl and a thing like a codpiece. He could have played
Osric in a postmodern Hamlet. He was accompanied by a bruiser with a
goatee - roadie or boyfriend, it wasn't clear - and emitted girlish
little squeals when our first course, a foul-smelling durian fruit
just shipped in from Malaysia, made its way to the table.
Everyone crowded into their seats: despite the vast size of the room,
we were an intime gathering. Yet it wouldn't be quite right merely to
say that everyone ignored me. As a non-artist and non-celebrity, I was
so `not there', it seemed - so cognitively unassimilable - I wasn't
even registered enough to be ignored. I sat at one end of the table
like a piece of anti-matter. I didn't exchange a word the whole night
with Lou Reed, who sat kitty-corner across from me. He remained silent
and surly. Everyone else gabbled happily on, however, about how they
loved to trash hotels when they were younger and how incompetent
everybody was at the Pompidou. `At my show I had to explain things to
them a thousand times. They just don't know how to do a major
retrospective.'
True, Sontag tried briefly to call the group's attention to me (with
the soul-destroying words, `Terry is an English professor'); and
Abramovic kindly gave me a little place card to write my name on. But
otherwise I might as well not have been born. My one conversational
gambit failed dismally: when I asked the man from the Guggenheim, to
my right, what his books were about, he regarded me disdainfully and
began, `I am famous for - ,' then caught himself. He decided to be
more circumspect - he was the `world's leading expert on Arte Povera'
- but then turned his back on me for the next two hours. At one point
I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying
to get my attention: she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to
undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held
up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed,
she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick of her
index finger: she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. I was reduced to
a pair of disembodied hands - like the ones that come out of the walls
and give people drinks in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.
Sontag gave up trying to include me and after a while seemed herself
to recede curiously into the background. Maybe she was already
starting to get sick again; she seemed oddly undone. Through much of
the conversation (dominated by glammy Osric) she looked tired and
bored, almost sleepy. She did not react when I finally decided to
leave - on my own - just after coffee had been served. I thanked
Marina Abramovic, who led me to the grungy metal staircase that went
down to the street and back to the world of the Little People. Turning
round one last time, I saw Sontag still slumped in her seat, as if
she'd fallen into a trance, or somehow just caved in. She'd clearly
forgotten all about me.
A fiasco, to be sure, but my final encounter with Sontag was possibly
more disastrous: my Waterloo. I had come to New York with Blakey, and
Sontag (to whom I wanted proudly to display her) said we could stop by
her apartment one afternoon. When we arrived at the appointed time,
clutching a large bouquet of orange roses, Sontag was nowhere to be
seen. Her young male assistant, padding delicately around in his
socks, showed us in, took the roses away, and whispered to us to wait
in the living-room. We stood in puzzled silence. Half an hour later,
somewhat blowsily, Sontag finally emerged from a back room. I
introduced her to Blakey, and said rather nervously that I hoped we
hadn't woken her up from a nap. It was as if I had accused her of
never having read Proust, or of watching soap operas all day. Her face
instantly darkened and she snapped at me violently. Why on earth did I
think she'd been having a nap? Didn't I know she never had naps? Of
course she wasn't having a nap! She would never have a nap! Never in a
million years! What a stupid remark to make! How had I gotten so
stupid? A nap - for God's sake!
She calmed down after a bit and became vaguely nice to Blakey - Blakey
had just read her latest piece on photography in the New Yorker and
was complimenting her effusively on it - but it was clear I couldn't
repair the damage I'd done. Indeed I made it worse. Sontag asked B. if
she had read The Volcano Lover and started in on a monologue (one I'd
heard before) about her literary reputation. It had `fallen' slightly
over the past decade, she allowed - foolishly, people had yet to grasp
the greatness of her fiction - but of course it would rise again
dramatically, `as soon as I am dead'. The same thing had happened,
after all, to Virginia Woolf, and didn't we agree Woolf was a great
genius? In a weak-minded attempt at levity, I said: `Do you really
think Orlando is a work of genius?' She then exploded. `Of course
not!' she shouted, hands flailing and face white with rage. `Of course
not! You don't judge a writer by her worst work! You judge her by her
best work!' I reeled backwards as if I'd been struck; Blakey looked
embarrassed. The assistant peeked out from another room to see what
was going on. Sontag went on muttering for a while, then grimly said
she `had to go'. With awkward thanks, we bundled ourselves hurriedly
into the elevator and out onto West 24th Street - Blakey agog, me all
nervy and smarting. When I sent Sontag a copy of my lesbian anthology
a few months later, a thousand pages long and complete with juicy
Highsmith excerpt, I knew she would never acknowledge it; nor did she.
Enfin - la fin. I heard she was dead as Bev and I were driving back
from my mother's after Christmas. Blakey called on the cellphone from
Chicago to say she had just read about it online; it would be on the
front page of the New York Times the next day. It was, but news of the
Asian tsunami crowded it out. (The catty thing to say here would be
that Sontag would have been annoyed at being upstaged; the honest
thing to say is that she wouldn't have been.) The Times did another
piece a few days later - a somewhat dreary set of passages from her
books, entitled: `No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths'. (An odd title: her
death wasn't easy, but she was all about hard books.) And in the weeks
since, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books and various other
highbrow mags have kicked in with the predictable tributes.
But I've had the feeling the real reckoning has yet to begin. The
reaction, to my mind, has been a bit perfunctory and stilted. A good
part of her characteristic `effect' - what one might call her
novelistic charm - has not yet been put into words. Among other
things, Sontag was a great comic character: Dickens or Flaubert or
James would have had a field day with her. The carefully cultivated
moral seriousness - strenuousness might be a better word - co-existed
with a fantastical, Mrs Jellyby-like absurdity. Sontag's complicated
and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. The
high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of
gossip, drollery and seductive acting out - and, when she was in a
benign and unthreatened mood, a fair amount of ironic self-knowledge.
I think she was fully conscious of - and took great pride and pleasure
in - the erotic spell she exerted over other women. I would be curious
to know how men found her in this regard; the few times I saw her with
men around, they seemed to relate to her as a kind of intellectually
supercharged eunuch. The famed `Natalie Wood' looks of her early years
notwithstanding, she seemed uninterested in being an object of
heterosexual desire, and males responded accordingly. It was not the
same with women - and least of all with her lesbian fans. Among the
susceptible, she never lost her sexual majesty. She was quite
fabulously butch - perhaps the Butchest One of All. She knew it and
basked in it, like a big lady she-cat in the sun.
Perhaps at some point there will be, too, a better and less routine
accounting of her extraordinary cultural significance. Granted, Great
Man (or Great Woman) theories of history have been out of fashion for
some time now. No single person, it's usually argued, has that much
effect on how things eventually turn out. Yet it is hard for me to
think about the history of modern feminism, say - especially as it
evolved in the United States in the 1970s - without Sontag in the
absolutely central, catalytic role. Simone de Beauvoir was floating
around too, of course, but for intellectually ambitious American women
of my generation, women born in the 1940s and 1950s, she seemed both
culturally unfamiliar and emotionally removed. Sontag, on the
contrary, was there: on one's own college campus, lecturing on Barthes
or Canetti or Benjamin or Tsvetaeva or Leni Riefenstahl. (And who were
they? One pretended to know, then scuttled around to find out.) She
was our very own Great Man. If there was ever going to be a Smart
Woman Team then Sontag would have to be both Captain and Most Valuable
Player. She was the one already out there doing the job, even as we
were labouring painfully to get up off the floor and match wits with
her.
In my own case, Sontag's death brings with it mixed emotions. God, she
could be insulting to people. At the end - as I enjoy blubbering to
friends - she was weally weally mean to me! But her death also leaves
me now with a profound sense of imploding fantasies - of huge
convulsions in the underground psychic plates. Not once,
unfortunately, on any of her California trips, did Sontag ever come to
my house, though I often sat around scheming how to get her to accept
such an invitation. If only she would come, I thought, I would be
truly happy. It's hard to admit how long - and how abjectly, like a
Victorian monomaniac - I carried this fantasy around. (It long
antedated my actual meeting with her.) It is still quite palpable in
the rooms in which I spend most of my time. Just about every book,
every picture, every object in my living-room, for example - I now see
all too plainly - has been placed there strategically in the hope of
capturing her attention, of pleasing her mind and heart, of winning
her love, esteem, intellectual respect etc etc. It's all baited and
set up: a room-sized Venus Fly-Trap, courtesy of T-Ball/ Narcissism
Productions.
There are her books of course: the vintage paperbacks of Against
Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn, the
quite-wonderful-despite-what-everybody-says The Volcano Lover. There's
Aids and Its Metaphors, On Photography, Where the Stress Falls. The
now valedictory Regarding the Pain of Others. And then there are some
of my own productions, to remind her, passive-aggressively, I guess,
that she's not the only damned person who writes. (Caveat lector:
Lilliputian on the rampage!) But then there's heaps of other stuff
sitting around, I'm embarrassed to say, the sole purpose of which is -
was - to impress her. A pile of `tasteful' art books: Popova, The
History of Japanese Photography, Cy Twombly, Nadar, Bronzino, Hannah
Hoch, Jeff Wall, Piranesi, Sol LeWitt and Jasper Johns, the big
Bellocq volume (with her introduction). My 1930s picture of Lucienne
Boyer. My Valentine Hugo photo of Breton and Aragon. The crammed CD
cabinet - with the six different versions of Pelléas. (Will I really
listen to any of them all the way through again before I die?) My
little 19th-century optical toy from Paris: you crank a tiny lever and
see a clown head, painted on glass, change expressions as if by magic.
Yet now the longed-for visitor - or victim - is never going to arrive.
Who will come in her place? At the moment it's hard to imagine anyone
ever possessing the same symbolic weight, the same adamantine
hardness, or having the same casual imperial hold over such a large
chunk of my brain. I am starting to think in any case that she was
part of a certain neural development that, purely physiologically
speaking, can never be repeated. All those years ago one evolved a
hallucination about what mental life could be and she was it. She's
still in there, enfolded somehow in the deepest layers of the grey
matter. Yes: Susan Sontag was sibylline and hokey and often a great
bore. She was a troubled and brilliant American and never as good a
friend as I wanted her to be. But now the lady's kicked it and I'm
trying to keep one of the big lessons in view: judge her by her best
work, not her worst.
[14]Terry Castle lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford. She
is the editor of The Literature of Lesbianism, and the author of Boss
Ladies, Watch Out!, a book of essays, many from the LRB.
References
14. http://www.lrb.co.uk/contribhome.php?get=cast01
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