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| Susan Sontag |
Susan Sontag once called Terry Castle “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” But her new book, "The Professor and Other Writings," proves she's one of our most expressive and enlightening memoirists as well.
Afew 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.
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The vengeful side of Castle's work first came to public attention through "Desperately Seeking Susan", her essay published in the London Review of Books in March 2005, just a few months after Susan Sontag's death. Here, Castle detailed her "on-again, off-again semi-friendship" with the great woman in which she played the humble groupie to Sontag's imperious star. She served as Sontag's chauffeur around southern California, a sympathetic audience for her kvetching about academics, an eager player in her games of intellectual one-upmanship, a purveyor of lesbian gossip to her closeted but insatiably curious androgynous persona ("I've loved men, Terry, I've loved women").
Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work (Ecco) succeeds as it does—magnificently, humanely—by displaying the same intellectual purchase, curiosity, and moral capaciousness to which his subject laid so inspiring and noble a claim over a lifetime. Susan Sontag was a difficult, galvanic presence in American arts and letters for half a century, and her biographer takes her measure with unfailing intelligence, honesty, and sympathy.
