Notes On Sontag

* Notes on Sontag Writers on Writers Also by Phillip Lopate Essays Being with Children Bachelorhood Against Joie de Vivre Portrait of My Body Totally Tenderly Tragically Waterfront: A Walk around Manhattan Rudy Burckhardt: Life and Work Getting Personal: Selected Writings Fic tion Confessions of Summer The Rug Merchant Two Marriages POETRY The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open The Daily Round EDITED ANTHOLOGIES Journal of a Living Experiment: The First Ten Years of Teachers & Writers Collaborative The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present Writing New York American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now Phillip Lopate  * Notes on Sontag Prince ton Universit y Press Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2009 by Phillip Lopate Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lopate, Phillip, 1943–   Notes on Sontag / by Phillip Lopate.     p. cm. — (Writers on writers)   ISBN 978-0-691-13570-0 (cloth : acid-free paper)  1.  Sontag, Susan, 1933–2004—Criticism and interpretation. 2.  Women and literature—United States—History—20th century.  3.  United States—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.   PS3569.O6547Z76 2009   818’.5409—dc22 2008041120 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro with Myriad Pro Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ press.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 * List of Abbre viations Books AAIM AI ATST DK IA IAM IE OP RPO SRW Aids and Its Metaphors (Picador, 1990) Against Interpretation (Dell, 1966) At the Same Time (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007) Death Kit (Signet, 1968) In America (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000) Illness as Metaphor (Picador, 1990) I, Etcetera (Vintage, 1979) On Photography (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977) Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2003) Styles of Radical Will (Picador, 2002) ἀ e Benefactor (Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1983) TTH Trip to Hanoi (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1968) TWWLN ἀ e Way We Live Now (Noonday, 1991) VL ἀ e Volcano Lover (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1992) . TB Ar ticles, Diaries, and Inter vie ws AR NYTM JA PIL TWW vi  & Introduction, “On Posters,” in Dugald Stermer, ἀ e Art of Revolution: 96 Posters from Cuba (London: Pall Mall, 1970) Diary Excerpts, New York Times Magazine, September 10, 2006 “Interview with Susan Sontag,” in Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints (Pantheon, 2007) “Pilgrimage,” New Yorker, December 21, 1987 “The Third World of Women,” Partisan Review 40, no. 1 (1973) * Introduc tion  The Judgment * For a writer to attempt a book about another writer, it requires nerve, some guild sympathy, and perhaps a dose of narcissistic projection. Also timing: when Ivan Bunin, who knew Che­ khov, was asked after the older writer’s death to do a biography of him, he hesitated. He waited almost fifty years, accruing nerve, writing his fiction, winning the Nobel Prize, until, at the brink of his own death, he composed a small book largely made up of questions about Che­khov and the unknowableness of any human being by another. &  1 I cannot wait to win the Nobel Prize. The idea of one writer meditating on another holds enormous appeal for me, because we feed so much on each other’s marrow. So when Princeton University Press, informing me o