Last month, the new generation indie e-bookstore, Emily Books, featured a deep, revealing extended profile of the writer Susan Sontag by her old friend Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan. Sontag was a kind of mentor to Nunez in Nunez’s early career. Like most student/mentor relationships, theirs was a complicated one—too close, too jealous, too loving, not exactly pure, entirely bittersweet. Like most true mentors, Sontag was a charismatic, and, like almost all charismatics, she was a complicated woman.
There have been some amazing portraits written about Sontag, not least among them, the plainspoken and very sad memoir about her death, Swimming in a Sea of Death, by her son David Rieff. Another emerged (haltingly) from her own journals, Reborn, which Rieff edited and had published posthumously.
When I first came to New York City in the mid-nineties, I worked at an organization that worked with Sontag on various projects and we had occasion to need to call her. (Prior to this, I had understood Susan Sontag to be an abstraction one studied, not a person you telephoned). We low-men on the totem pole lived to dread the starling-like siren of our boss, “Can someone please get Susan on the phone! Please now!”
Whoever did end up having to call Susan Sontag, inevitably did it wrong. It was the wrong time of day. We were calling her for the wrong reason. We should have spoken into the answering machine. We should not have spoken into the answering machine. One of my friends there, Emily Hall, who was, like me, in an MFA program hoping to become a writer one day …when we all grew up, was very very sternly chastised by Susan Sontag. Did she not know that writers should not be called during the day. Any idiot would know that. Emily was green when she got off the phone. The reprimand was existential—for all of us. If we were true writers, we wouldn’t be sitting around an office, placing phone calls and quivering in front of Rolodexes.
And then inevitably, our boss would come floating out of her office, having just hung up from the phone call that we had dared place on her behalf, a dreamy look on her face. “Susan,” she would exclaim, “just gave me her Monteverdi tickets for tonight! She can’t use them! Isn’t that wonderful! Orfeo is so extraordinary, don’t you think, Minna?”
Hrumpf.
But that was celebrity Sontag. I have a much deeper concern with the writer Sontag; and abstraction, or not, she is a kind of virtual mentor for me (meaning, I’ve had to conjure up a CGI version of her all by myself—working with text and Playdoh—with the ambition of learning everything I could, or even anything).
My point: I think that Emily Gould and Ruth Curry are doing an excellent thing with their e-bookstore / book club. I think that Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan is an amazing book that we should all read in order to learn how to describe someone. I posted something for Emily Books about my own mentor, the ethereal Italian writer, Monica Sarsini. And to add hyperlinks to flotsam, here are two reviews I’ve written about Sontag: one for Bookforum after the publication her essay collection, Where the Stress Falls. And the other for Time Out, New York on her diaries, Reborn. (In which review, I see that I revealed identifying details about the organization where I once worked. Oh well.)
Minna