Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

I met Susan Sontag once, at a party.  She came up and praised something that I had written.  Thrilled, I began chattering about I don't know what.  Sontag froze.  She retreated, taking backward steps before running away.  It dawned on me that receiving her blessing was supposed to have been enough; a solemn initiation.  I had presumed on it.
--Peter Schjeldahll, "77 Sunset Me," The New Yorker (Dec. 23, 2019).

The record of Sontag's kindly and generous acts is brief; that of her egotism, selfishness and cruelty, copius.
Joseph Epstein; "Susan Sontag, Savant-Idiot," Commentary (December 2019)

For almost fifty years, she, more than any other prominent public figure, had set the terms of the cultural debate in a way that no intellectual had done before, or has done since.
--Benjamin Moser, Sontag (HarperCollins, 2019).

I often saw Susan Sontag (who died in 2004) at The New York City Ballet and was tempted to approach her with questions about Robert Bresson or Balanchine or something that she had written.  I am glad now I never did; based on the many incidents reported in Moser's biography I doubt that she would have given me the time of day.  Among other things she wrote that "the white race is the cancer of history" and the music of Mozart and the ballets of Balanchine do not redeem it.  In her intelligent essay about Bresson and spirituality she writes "it is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color" and when Bresson made five films in color she did not, as far as I can find out, write anything about them. She was a supporter of North Vietnam as well as Castro's Cuba and then abruptly changed her mind, referring to communism as "fascism with a human face."  She treated her son badly and was subsidized by Roger Straus, her publisher, and Annie Leibowitz, her lover, to the tune of millions of dollars, but often treated Leibowitz cruelly, especially in public, and resisted all attempts to encourage her to come out of the closet during the AIDS crisis.

At this point what will Sontag be remembered for?  Probably not for her turgid movies or her  misguided novels -- I've seen the movies and read the books -- so that leaves her dubious essays, including "Notes on 'Camp'" in 1964, published in Partisan Review.  Sontag was attacked by some defenders of high culture as a "leveler" of culture but her references to popular music (the Supremes) and American films (Budd Boetticher) were few and far between and demonstrated little insight into popular culture.  She did bring some limited attention to foreign writers such as E.M. Cioran and others but her attention span was limited and she was always moving on to something else, even writing Illness as Metaphor without mentioning her own struggles with her health.  Perhaps she will be remembered as one of the last "public intellectuals," always ready to speak her mind to anyone who would listen.