Regarding Susan Sontag Page #3

herself as being both

a theorist and a

fiction writer.

Always wanted the

double identity.

That's why I find "The

Benefactor" a really brave book

even though it's a bad novel.

ZWERLING:
I started feeling very

lonely, and it was winter.

Winter is awful in Paris.

Susan was living in

New York already.

I just had the idea--maybe

I should go back to New York

for a while and

see what it's like.

WOMAN, AS SONTAG: There has

appeared in New York recently

a new and still esoteric

genre of spectacle--

at first sight, apparently

a cross between art exhibit

and theatrical performance.

These events have been given

the modest and somewhat

teasing name of "Happenings".

ZWERLING:
Susan was living on

West End Avenue with her son.

And I moved in with her,

and she met Irene Fornes.

Irene and I had been

involved before.

I really loved her,

but we had broken up already.

Anyway, concerning Susan,

things were going on

that I didn't quite get.

I'd be there with David,

putting David to bed and she'd

come home, like, 3:00 in the

morning, reeking of Mitsouko

which is a wonderful perfume

of Guerlain, which I had

given to Irene,

and I didn't pick up on it.

Irene was her best lover.

As I've said to many people,

Irene could make a stone come.

I mean, she was

just incredible.

With Irene, you had a real

functioning creative artist.

A part of the downtown

Bohemia of her time.

Susan discovered the

brilliance of talent as

opposed to the

brilliance of intellect.

There were these remarkable

people who didn't know

anything about the issues that

were so important to her,

who had never read Nietzsche,

who can't spell or

pronounce his name.

That was a jolt for her

and a liberating one.

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

What I love; what draws me

very much to writing is it's

a way of paying attention

to the world.

You're just an instrument for

tuning in to as much reality

as you can.

KOCH:
I met Susan

right around the time

that "Notes on Camp" hit

and transformed her position.

WOMAN:
Sontag was an iron lady.

She was imperious,

magisterial, authoritative.

"Here is what Camp is.

"No one's ever thought about

it before, and I'll tell you

what it is."

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

The two pioneering forces of

modern sensibility are Jewish

moral seriousness

and homosexual aestheticism

and irony.

KOCH:
Here was the possibility

of this gay trash coming forward

and claiming a

position for itself.

Moving away from supposed high

seriousness to low seriousness

was seen as a very threatening

thing to a certain generation.

It was a watershed moment.

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

The essence of Camp is

its love of the unnatural,

of artifice and

exaggeration.

The most refined form of sexual

attractiveness, as well as the

most refined form of sexual

pleasure consists in going

against the grain

of one's sex.

KOCH:
She's not making a big

theoretical argument.

She's saying "Look at this,

look at that, look at this,

look at that", and by the time

you're through, something's

been opened up to you.

You don't have to be

Schoenberg. You could be

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire

and it could be good.

Maybe it's so bad

that it's good!

The idea of Camp was something

absolutely unknown to

straight people.

Really what Camp

was was a code.

NELSON:
She's saying "I'm a

cultural ethnographer.

"I've gone into this strange

land of queers and I know

"something about them but I'm

not the native informant.

"I'm the outsider who's gone in

to study them with a certain

kind of scrupulousness,

but I'm not of them."

You could just read between

the lines. Of course she was

paying attention to gay lingo.

She couldn't have written

"Notes on Camp" if she hadn't

done decades of homework.

Honestly.

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

My desire to write is

connected to my homosexuality.

I need the identity as a

weapon to match the weapon

that society has against me.

I am just becoming aware of

how guilty I feel being queer.

The photograph of her

on "I, Etcetera"

was a sort of pin-up

for every graduate school

lesbian that I knew.

It was just magnificent.

And you felt sort of like

ohhh...it's school girlish

to respond in this way

to the photograph,

especially cause

she won't come out.

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

No matter what I

have said, my life,

my actions say that I have

not loved the truth,

that I have not

wanted the truth.

CASTLE:
I distinctly

remember people saying,

"Well, she should just--

"she should come out.

She is just

letting us all down."

This is a completely unfair--

first of all, to me,

it's an unfair thing

to say about anyone.

At fir--I--and this is

an age thing.

To someone my age, this seems

to me like a private thing.

Why is it a private thing?

Because for someone my age,

for most of your life, it had

to be a secret thing.

In "The Benefactor," her first

novel, in 1963, she has

the following sentence: "I am

a homosexual and a writer,

"both of whom are

professionally

self-regarding and

self-esteeming creatures."

Does the author of "Notes

on Camp" have to come out?

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

To interpret is to impoverish--

to deplete the world in order

to set up a shadow world

of meanings.

The aim of all commentary on

art should be to make works

of art and our own experience

more, rather than

less real to us.

We need an erotics of art.

MAN:
"The lady swings.

"She digs the Supremes and

is savvy about Camp.

"She likes her hair wild

and her sentences intense.

"Miss Sontag has written

a ponderable, vivacious

and quite astonishingly

American book."

KOCH:
Susan was a star.

It was certainly not

just her ideas.

She had gone from being a

rising figure of obvious

interest to being suddenly

this famous writer.

Boom--there would be

something by Susan, and it

leapt out...and it wasn't

because of anything other than

its literary star quality.

Style was a huge

part of her work.

And style--her style as a

writer was inseparable from

her style as a person.

She was beautiful

and glamorous.

There's no question

about that.

And she was very conscious of

the effect she had on people.

Now, Susan, smile.

Ha ha ha!

Say cheese.

KOCH:
Susan was,

among other things,

tremendously photogenic...

and knew it.

Just what

you're doing.

Tell me

when it starts.

Yes, I'll tell you

when it starts.

Whenever I read about her,

there's almost always a phrase:

"One of the most

photographed women

of her generation,"

like this is some

sort of accident of

nature, like an earthquake.

She knew the power

of photography.

So she created that image,

and it worked.

WOMAN, AS SONTAG:

Being photographed, I

feel transfixed, trapped.

I become the looked at.

For as much as I am a

professional see-er, I am

a hopelessly amateur see-ee,

an eternal photographic

virgin.

I feel the same perplexity

each time I am photographed.

[Audience murmuring

and laughing]

I don't like being called

a "lady writer," Norman.

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