Customer Reviews

Notes on Sontag (Writers on Writers)

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There's great imaginative sympathy in this assessment of Sontag and her work, and no knife in the ribs. It's utterly unlike those remembrances of literary celebrities by contemporaries who establish their authority by boasting of intimacy with the subject and then use these occasions to tell secrets and destroy reputations.
Judicious though the book is, Lopate's tone is anything but solemn. Instead, he registers his interest, approval, exasperation, amusement, disapproval, envy of Sontag, conflicted longing for friendship with her, etc., as he goes along. He writes here both as critic and as personal essayist and what he creates is a kind of double portrait. By acknowledging and examining his reactions, he frees himself from their control; that makes his stance toward his subject particularly supple, and his insights multi-angled.
Through his career as a personal essayist, Lopate has valued balance. He has demonstrated the art of balance in his own personal essays and students and admirers have taken note. It hasn't been a cautious, middle-of-the-road kind of exercise, but a real struggle, at times a painful one, requiring the disclosure of much that is unbecoming. Over and over he has achieved it (would that Sontag had!). Here he has done it again, and with this little book, has -- I believe -- truly established himself as a literary senior statesman.

Philip Lopate is a wonderful essayist with an always engaging personal style. He does a credible job at reviewing Sontag's work and personality as he experienced it and her. He also comes clean on his need for her approval and having to live with the fact that he never got it.

But I think he dances around the elephant in the room which is Sontag's self-mythology that spawned a cultural equivalent about her. While much of her writing is laudable, incisive and even brillant, it will be her iconic status as both the high priestess of intellectual seriousness and that of the sexy, man-eating intellectual that will forever cast a shadow over often her impressive work.

Maybe Lopate was too close to both aspects - the intellectual elite where Sontag really matters and his own personal even if tenuous relationship with the diva.

For all her brilliance, Sontag is said to have been a petty, insecure, often cold and insensitive snob who was unable to transform her acute intelligence into productive self awareness and dare I say, grace as she aged.

That is what made her iconic, the towering intellectual who was clueless about human beings. I believe that her soaring gracelessness is the stuff of New York intelligentsia legend. Lopate hints at this reputation and gives us just a taste of it in the book. Rather than tip-toe around the Sontagian personality, that toxic mixture of myth making, extreme vulnerability, massive ego, and extreme vitality, he should have confronted it directly along with her writing. For the truth is that Sontag will forever remain a legendary personality that will be remember long after anyone remembers the title of a single one of her books.

Phillip Lopate is an essayist writing a warm essay about a great essayist, the late Susan Sontag. This little book is an incisive account of Sontag's accomplished aesthetic and cultural writings; it traces her career from the stylish and radical defender of camp to the solemn moralist of Regarding the Pain of Others. Lopate strives for balance in his account, he constantly weighs her achievements against her failings as a novelist in such a way as to present a reasonably fair assessment. There are naturally many moments of Lopate's own insecurity in this text-too many anecdotes regarding Sontag's failure to see his talent. But still, this is a rich and valuable text.

Phillip Lopate, warm and sane as ever, labors diligently to persuade us that Sontag is a major intellect and a permanent writer. He fails, of course, but that is Sontag's fault and not his own. Lopate can be faulted for his Manhattan insularity, his dated cinephilia, his excessive loyalty to formative youth experiences (the latter accounting for both his datedness and his insularity). But these are human frailties, and Lopate is never less than attractively human, something which can hardly be said of Sontag.

The genre is called the posthumous hatchet job, of which we seem to have far too many practitioners on Amazon. They employ an all-too-familiar strategy that readers must actively and vigilantly resist. Specifically in this case: The reviewer expresses regret for Philip Lopate's efforts, namely the book at hand, by blaming it all on his chosen subject. He lets Lopate off the hook in the most condescending manner possible because he has a much bigger target all along. Philip, you poor fellow, it's not your fault that you ended up writing such a bad book. It's Sontag's fault! It does not matter that her work means so much to you, that you care passionately about it, that it has influenced and inspired you, and that you are an intelligent, graceful, and original writer in your own right.

Fellow readers, let us not be fooled by such blatant intellectual dishonesty. We know what the reviewer REALLY wants to say. It is this: That Sontag did not toe the Israeli/Zionist line and must therefore be punished in the guise of a "review". To the eternal fury of many Jewish-Americans, Sontag insisted that to be anti-Zionist, which she was, does NOT mean to be anti-Semitic. Anyone who dares take such a heretical public stand, as Sontag very prominently did, must be silenced, discredited, and destroyed at all cost. Every opportunity to attack her must not be missed. Sontag can never ever be forgiven, must be vilified not only in life but even more vehemently so in death, when she can no longer respond to her critics.

The only thing Sontag's critics prove is that the self-anointed Jewish-American cabal of "writers", "artists", "intellectuals", "scholars", and "commentators" is obsolete, irrelevant, and intellectually bankrupt, a spent force. If America is to have a vibrant cultural life in the 21st century, it must look permanently elsewhere for inspiration because the truly great Jewish-American writers, artists, intellectuals, scholars, and commentators are for the most part gone, Sontag preeminently among them. All we're left with are crummy reviewers.

Sontag was right not only about Zionism but a lot of other things, two of which need to be emphasized here: The misogyny and the anti-intellectualism that continue to diminish (and degrade) America, both of which she fought throughout her life. Sontag not only knew but experienced them firsthand because she was a prime target of (and completely triumphant over) both evils. In the process, she evidently gained more than her fair share of detractors, doubters, and enemies, most of whom do not have what it takes to think.

The ardor and skepticism that Susan Sontag's work elicits, promotes, and instills in those of us who are willing to keep an open mind and judge her work on its intrinsic merits: This is the true subject of Philip Lopate's brilliantly argued and beautifully written book. And this is what any honest review of his book should be about, not the nonsense that is maliciously spewed by a reviewer with a hidden agenda. If you still care about what really matters and why reading can be a joyful experience, read Lopate's book. Ignore the shameful, biased, and misogynistic reviews and reviewers here. We have no use for them. Whereas we need Sontag now more than ever. Sontag is timeless. Sontag will endure. Thank you, Mr. Lopate, for honoring her with your thoughtful remembrance.