Sontag: Her Life and Work By Benjamin Moser
A review of Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (2019). Published by Ecco.
To preface this review, I’m a huge Susan Sontag fan, and that probably is a good reason I was desperate to get my hands on such a thick book about her. Clocking in at about 832 pages, this book truly is a monster to get through, especially if you’re not used to reading intensive, well-researched books and biographies about one single person. When I read Savage Beauty, the biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay that was done by Nancy Milford, it took me about a month to chug through that biography because I had to keep putting it down and think about it. That was the last big biography I read (although in my room I currently have a Queen Victoria and a Jacqueline Kennedy biography I need to chug through once I stop obsessively checking books out at the library), and so that was the only one recent I could compare this to.
In case you’re not aware of who Susan Sontag is, she was an influential writer and critic who first gained fame with her essay “Notes on Camp” that officially appeared in the world in the mid-1960s. Since then, and over the course of her lifetime, she wrote many big pieces of criticism about art, photography, and the way we depict things in everyday life, and was also a prolific novelist and playwright. This woman was incredible and you can’t deny that.
With this preamble getting a bit long, let’s just jump right into it.
Content
We begin this biography with the humble origins of Sontag’s grandmother: she was an extra on a movie about the Armenian genocides while they were still occurring. Noted for being too realistic, this film would depict the torture, rapes, and murders of Armenian men, women, and children too realistically and too cruelly, causing great strife to the survivors. This sets the scene almost immediately for what Sontag would argue for during her lifetime: the idea of photography, film, and art as a construct and a spectacle.
There’s a lot packed into this biography, and, at over eight-hundred pages, I would hope that the content included within manages to cover a lot of her work with an analysis plus why she was the way she was. Along the way I learned new facts that I had never known before—e.g. how she lived in Arizona before moving to Los Angeles—and felt like I was getting a lot of information at once but it wasn’t overwhelming. Some biographies are pretty dry when you’re reading through them, but I felt comfortable ploughing through the pages of this one.
Susan Sontag was an extremely complicated woman and cannot be boiled down to just her achievements. I think you can’t separate her work from who she was a person because of how integral it was to her. She was messy, that doesn’t excuse some of her actions, but that’s how humans are. We all make mistakes. An overarching theme throughout her life was her relationship to her mother, who is described as cold and distant to her children. Sontag also refused labels, despite being of a Jewish background and was very much a lesbian in denial. The 1970s was a time where people believed that sexuality can be flipped over like a switch, and Sontag, while publicly tending to appear with men, actually dreamed of being with women from a young age.
My qualms with this biography was that at times, Mooser did indeed seem to insert his personal thoughts about what Sontag was, especially in regards to mental health and illness. I didn’t feel too right about speculating what she may have had—perhaps because I didn’t get the impression that firsthand sources were consulted with that. Besides that, I felt that Mooser did a good job putting everything together, with extensive research and footnotes available at the end of the book, and that the writing was fairly smooth.
I think this biography is really in-depth and is quite informative, even for those who might claim to be Sontag experts after reading all of her work. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up if you’re even vaguely interested in her personal life, because you’ll find it enriching how you read her cultural criticism and essays.
Overall Thoughts
I tend to like biographies because they tend to humanize and complicate figures that we previously think as black and white. Humans are messy beings, as much as we try to hide it or not. And Susan Sontag isn’t exactly known for her personal life as much as she is for her intellectual works—hell, even her fiction and plays tend to be lost in the mainstream. But Sontag was a deeper person than her work—it only scraped the surface of her beliefs and her past. I think if you’re looking to understand Sontag and her work a bit more, then this will be the perfect book for you. There’s some questionable aspects to the biography in regards to the author’s decisions, as I discussed before, but, overall, I think this is a solid biography worth picking up. One day when I have more space I’ll definitely be picking up a physical copy for myself.
