Susan Sontag

The name Susan Sontag has always been synonymous with “Intellectual.” At the university bookstore where I used to work, I regarded the book, Regarding the Pain of Others, but that’s all I did. I just regarded it, the same way the man in the cover illustration is regarding the hanged person, dangling lifelessly. I was too afraid to open it. I knew it probably contained deep infinite wisdom, but it may have also contained disturbing photos and stories of pointless, incurable human suffering. The intensity of that book was intimidating enough closed. To open it might be dangerous. Either the contents would be too much for my delicate sensibilities or so intellectually torturous that it would make me feel totally stupid. I knew she was Annie Leibowitz’s partner and had seen photos of her, taken by Leibowtiz. I assumed Sontag was a brooding intellectual because she looked like one.

Well, I still haven’t read, Regarding the Pain of Others, but I just read an essay by Susan Sontag called “Pilgrimage,” which is about the time she met German novelist Thomas Mann when she was just 14 years old. Her self-congratulatory exclamations over her brilliance made it sound as if she never got over her egocentric adolescence. Either that, or she was just a very confident woman, aware of her intellectual superiority and not shy about expounding upon her own extraordinariness.

I loved the essay. I imagined meeting one of my heroes when I was that young. When I was in elementary school, I thought Mark Twain was God. Really. (You can blame the ending of the movie, The Adventures of Mark Twain, in which Mark Twain’s compassionate face appears in the clouds.) In middle school, I thought Tom Waits was Jesus. Not really, but he was just as worthy of worship if you asked 14-year-old me. I would not have handled a meeting with one of these men with as much grace as Susan Sontag did when she met Thomas Mann. I also wouldn’t have been so critical of one of my idols, especially if he had been as kind and hospitable as Thomas Mann. She called him a god, but she also said he sounded like “The Saturday Evening Post,” when she read the much more high-brow “Partisan Review.” She wrote, “We neither of us were at our best,” but why would Thomas Mann be aiming for his “best” just to please a fourteen-year-old fan? Perhaps he just didn’t sound as intellectual as she had hoped. I will have to read her essay again. Also, I just discovered that one of my new favorite writers, Sigrid Nunez, wrote a memoir about her relationship with Sontag. Apparently, Sontag mentored her. They are both incredible writers. Actually, Sontag was. She passed away in 2004.

Here is an interview with Susan Sontag I found on youtube. I think she’s being rude to the interviewer. I wonder if 14-year-old Sontag would have appreciated her meeting with Thomas Mann more if he had assumed this kind of superior attitude and expressed  this same kind of loathing for her.