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Susan Superstar

The middlebrow media embraced Sontag near the height of its influence in the mid-sixties. It has been imploding ever since. During the seventies and eighties, important middlebrow bastions like Saturday Review and Life folded. Time’s authority dwindled; it spends far less time translating highbrow. Similarly, Harper’s and The Atlantic aren’t as deeply implanted in American homes as they once were.

Middlebrow may have been mind-numbingly earnest, and it may have lacked the critical faculties to consistently distinguish the worthy from the shoddy, as Macdonald and Greenberg charged. But middlebrow magazines treated intellectuals respectfully, even reverently, so much so that they actually paid attention to their thoughts and writings.

In the new media constellation, without any robust middlebrow presence to mediate the interactions between intellectuals and the public, high and low mingle much more freely. Intellectuals have been annexed to the celebrity culture, which deems them most worthy of attention when they have acquired a supermodel as arm candy or bitch-slap a hostile reviewer at dinner. Sontag suffered this fate. She earned gossip-column mentions for her relationship with Annie Leibovitz—and then when the New York Post accused of Leibovitz of cuckolding Sontag with the nanny caring for Leibovitz’s daughter. Even though many of Sontag’s close friends don’t know many details about the relationship, bloggers and activists flew into high dudgeon when obituaries omitted any mention of Leibovitz.

In the eyes of most Americans, Sontag became a vaguely meaningful reference in movies like Bull Durham and Gremlins 2. Sample line of Gremlins’ poetic homage, written in free verse: “Civilization, yes. The Geneva Convention, chamber music, Susan Sontag . . . we want to be civilized.”

Camille Paglia, the soi-disant wild woman of nineties academe, has carefully studied Sontag’s image, and wrote an essay on the subject, “Sontag, Bloody, Sontag.” This was no mere intellectual exercise. She intended to use Sontag as a career model—to discern pop culture’s reasons for celebrating Sontag and then exploit her findings to launch herself to similar stardom. “I’m the Sontag of the 1990s—there’s no doubt about it,” Paglia claimed in one of her typical bouts of modesty. Following Sontag’s lead, she let fly a string of provocative arguments, praising prostitution and announcing a new school of “drag queen feminism.” (Hard to camp it up more than that.) Working through “Page Six” and Entertainment Weekly, she attempted to bait Sontag into a fight, taunting her as “the heavyweight who used to be the bully on the block.”

For the most part, Sontag resisted these entreaties and turned away from Paglia’s stunts. “We used to think that Norman Mailer was bad, but [Paglia] makes Mailer look like Jane Austen,” Sontag said in the Sunday Times of London. It was telling that Sontag felt such chilliness toward Paglia. Over the last two decades of her life, Sontag became an eloquent critic of the culture’s turn away from “seriousness,” its relinquishment of Partisan Review high-mindedness for Paglia-like frivolity. She began to worry that her writings may have played an unwitting role in this change. In the 1996 introduction to a new edition of Against Interpretation, she wrote, “What I didn’t understand (I was surely not the right person to understand this) was that seriousness itself was in the early stages of losing credibility in the culture at large, and that some of the more transgressive art I was enjoying would reinforce frivolous, merely consumerist transgressions. Thirty years later, the undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete, with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries.” Irving Howe and her most persistent critic, Hilton Kramer, had been lobbing this very complaint against her for many years. Indeed, Sontag’s later critical work dwells on the matter of seriousness at such length that the only critic to invoke it more is New Criterion culture scold Kramer.

The trajectory of Sontag’s thought can be difficult to make out. “She went through phases, like a pendulum,” Victor Navasky says. It’s easy to think this about her politics and to clock her swing from one provocative stance to the next. In the sixties, she condemned America for its gaucheness; in the eighties, she turned anti-communist; then, after 9/11, her New Yorker piece seemed to show a reversion to New Leftism. But, in the end, the 9/11 essay might best be regarded as an anomaly. The piece irreparably damaged some old friendships—Leon Wieseltier never spoke to her again—and even caused her to quarrel with her son, the writer David Rieff. Other friends maintained relations with her by proffering rationalizations for the outburst. They say that she wouldn’t have seemed so heartless if she hadn’t witnessed events from afar in Berlin. Indeed, there’s evidence that she came to regret the 460-word piece. In interviews, she refined her argument, nearly to the point of retraction. She told Salon a month after the piece’s publication, “I’ll take the American empire any day over the empire of what my pal Chris Hitchens calls ‘Islamic fascism.’ I’m not against fighting this enemy—it is an enemy and I’m not a pacifist.”

This statement might not quite put her in Hilton Kramer’s camp, but nevertheless finds her not far outside of it. In fact, a closer inspection of her politics reveals that over time they grew considerably less Marxian and more genuinely liberal. Aryeh Neier, head of the Open Society Institute, watched the transformation up close. He saw how, under the influence of Eastern European émigrés like Joseph Brodsky, she came to recognize the horrors of the communist system. During the eighties, he watched her mount a vigorous campaign of solidarity with Salman Rushdie as Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa sent the Satanic Verses author underground. She publicly supported Rushdie at a time when Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller shied from protesting the fatwa on Good Morning America. Finally, Neier argues that the humanitarian interventions of the nineties gave Sontag new appreciation for American power. In 1993, Sontag famously sojourned to besieged Sarajevo, producing performances of Waiting for Godot and living in a bone-cold Holiday Inn with bombed-out rooms and sniper fire spraying into windows. Neier claims, “There’s no question that she had become a liberal—and that’s how she thought of herself.”

In other words, her political story is less like a pendulum and, strangely, more like the rightward drift of her old colleagues from Partisan Review. Of course, an enormous gap separated Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz from her—although Sontag, as a University of Chicago undergrad, did have a healthy interest in the neoconservative guru Leo Strauss. Where they became blind partisans, Sontag never relocated to another political movement. But like them, she looked back with discomfort at her younger self. She also followed them in acquiring an admiration for bourgeois democracy—the common ground she and her son shared when they forcefully made the case for intervention in the Balkans.

Whenever Sontag changed course and reconsidered a position, it was often greeted as mere posturing or the annoying tendency of a fashionista jumping on the next intellectual trend. “A Writer Who Begs to Differ . . . With Herself,” the Times headline of a Michiko Kakutani review of Regarding the Pain of Others quipped. Sontag was never permitted the luxury of sincere self-revision that the preceding generation of New York intellectuals enjoyed. The ur-critic of photography might have anticipated this fate. As she repeatedly pointed out, modern human beings, a group that presumably includes her highbrow comrades, remember the past as a series of images. Sontag, such an appealing and ever-ready target for the camera, survived flash-frozen in a fixed generational pose. She could never escape those Arbus and Penn spreads from her youth—radical, radically chic, fiendishly engaged in Pop Art—images that supplanted the more complicated narrative of her life. On Photography, written nearly three decades ago, made this point in a memorably wistful tone:“Today, everything exists to end in a photograph.”