Susan Sontag

The fellowship that became an escape

She was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City on 16 January 1933, the daughter of a fur trader who died when she was five. Her mother Mildred took the family to Miami and then to Tucson, and on to Los Angeles in 1945, where she married a decorated serviceman called Nathan Sontag; Susan was never formally adopted but took his name. She spent a semester at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1949, at sixteen, was admitted to the University of Chicago.

At Chicago she walked late into a class on Kafka taught by a young sociologist named Philip Rieff. He asked her name at the end of the hour, and they married ten days later. Their son David was born in 1952. She took a master's degree in philosophy at Harvard, and in 1957 won a fellowship to spend a year at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she sat in on a seminar by the philosopher J. L. Austin and found the university's attitude to women intolerable. By Christmas she had gone to Paris instead.

The Left Bank year

Paris was cheap in 1957, and it held a large American colony. Sontag fell in with the writers around the Paris Review, the literary quarterly founded in the city five years earlier. Through them she met the writer Alfred Chester, who introduced her to Robert Silvers; five years later Silvers helped launch the New York Review of Books and gave her the platform that carried her essays for the rest of her life.

The reason she stayed was Harriet Sohmers. They had met at the Berkeley campus book exchange in 1949, when Sohmers was several years older and knew a city Sontag had only read about: she took the sixteen-year-old across to the lesbian bars of San Francisco and became her first lover. Sohmers was now living in Paris, and the affair started again. It occupies more pages of the Paris notebooks than anything else in them.

The rest of the year went into looking and listening. She heard Simone de Beauvoir speak at the Sorbonne and was put off by her high voice. She called on the American poet Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky at their hotel on the rue Gît-le-Cœur, the cheap Latin Quarter lodging house the Beat writers had taken over. She went to her first Paris party at the home of the philosopher Jean Wahl. Above all she went to the cinema, and to French philosophy and fiction, with the seriousness of someone laying in supplies: the taste for European film that runs through all her later criticism was assembled here.

An aristocracy of sensibility as well as an aristocracy of intellect. Don't like at all, at all being treated as a plebeian!

New York, and Notes on "Camp"

The affair broke down when Sontag wanted Sohmers more than Sohmers wanted her, and the money ran out. She sailed for America in 1958. Philip Rieff met her at the airport, and she told him before they got into the car that she wanted a divorce.

She recovered custody of David after a fight, refused alimony and child support, took an editorial job at the magazine Commentary, moved into a small Manhattan apartment and started writing. Her first novel, The Benefactor, came out in 1963. The Paris notebooks stop in late 1963, on the edge of the essay that made her famous.

"Notes on 'Camp'" appeared in the autumn of 1964 in Partisan Review, then the most serious literary magazine in America. Written as a run of numbered notes rather than an argument, it described a way of enjoying things that were extravagant, artificial and slightly absurd — a sensibility, Sontag wrote, whose bearers were mainly homosexuals, at a point when that could not be said neutrally in a general magazine. She dedicated it to Oscar Wilde and quoted him all the way through. Time magazine picked it up, and Sontag became a public figure at thirty-one.

The books that followed set the pattern of taking a subject nobody thought needed an argument and giving it one:

• Against Interpretation (1966) — the essays of the early 1960s, including "Camp", arguing that criticism had become a way of replacing works of art instead of looking at them.
• Styles of Radical Will (1969) — cinema, pornography as literature, and the trip to Hanoi she made in 1968 in protest at the Vietnam War.
• On Photography (1977) — six essays on what taking pictures does to the people who look at them, printed without a single photograph in it.
• Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) — portraits of writers and film-makers, among them her essay on Leni Riefenstahl, "Fascinating Fascism".
• Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) — a late return to photography, and to images of war, that abandoned several of On Photography's sharpest claims.

Illness, and a clinic in Paris

Sontag was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in the 1970s and went back to Paris for experimental treatment. Illness as Metaphor (1978) was written under that diagnosis. Its argument is a plain one made at length: tuberculosis and cancer have been loaded with meanings about the patient's character, the passionate temperament or the repressed one, and those meanings punish the sick a second time, on top of the disease. AIDS and Its Metaphors (1989) did the same work for a new epidemic.

She survived that cancer and a second one, and in 1998 was diagnosed with a rare uterine cancer, which killed her on 28 December 2004, at seventy-one. Her son David Rieff published her Paris-era journals four years later as Reborn.

Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo

In April 1993 Sontag visited Sarajevo, a city under siege. She decided that visiting was not enough, went back in July, and put on a play at the Youth Theatre: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the tragicomedy about two men waiting by a road for someone who never comes, which had premiered in Paris in 1953.

The city's electricity had been cut off. Rehearsals ran by candle and flashlight, with actors who arrived exhausted from queuing for water and crossing streets covered by snipers. Sontag used Act I only and tripled the two leads, so that three pairs of Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett's two waiting men, were on stage at once; the production opened on 17 August 1993 and played two afternoon performances a day. She wrote her own account of it that October for the New York Review of Books.

Paris kept her

She died in New York, and she is buried in Paris. "My mother lies buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris," David Rieff wrote in the first line of the epilogue to his 2008 memoir about her illness and death, which puts her a short walk from the quarter she had come to as a graduate student fifty years earlier.

The city added a street to the record in 2014. By a municipal deliberation of 17 June that year, a seventy-eight-metre way in the 19th arrondissement, running from the rue Cesária Évora to number 189 boulevard Macdonald in the Pont-de-Flandre quarter, was named the passage Susan Sontag. The city's register describes her, in the flat register of official French, as an American essayist and novelist, New York 1933 to New York 2004.