A Big New Biography of Susan Sontag Digs to Find the Person Beneath the Icon

That is not to suggest that Moser’s project is in any way superficial. Or, after a hundred or so words about the subject's hairdo, that the review promises to be anything but.

You may want to check the assertion that Sontag and Paglia were friends.

Ah, I loved the black and white photograph of biographer Benjamin Moser included with this review of his “Sontag.” Let’s say it’s an episode of NYPD Blue and I’m asked, from a line-up of literary biographers—Mike Lennon (Norman Mailer), Blake Bailey (John Cheever), Judith Thurman (Isak Dinesen), James Atlas (Saul Bellow), Richard Ellmann (James Joyce) and Moser—to pick Sontag’s biographer, well, I’d have to pick Moser. He looks like Sontag’s biographer. Now, as to whether the other biographers look like their subject’s biographers, I’ll have to leave that to another line-up.

I was a student of Philip Rieff's in the 1980s. At the time a number of us were convinced that Sontag wrote the book, not because it was in her voice, but because it in no way resembled anything else he ever produced. The language was dramatically different as was the structure. You can't account for the difference by suggesting she merely edited it.

I hope they will translate this book to Portuguese soon! His biography of Clarice Lispector is a great work!

I just finished reading “The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace” by H.W. Brands. The book shed very little light on “the man.” I have a collection of books by Susan Sontag, which I have read sporadically. I find that the best, if not the only way, to learn about an individual, the person behind the words, is a close reading of the works written by that person. These words, I’ve found, reveal more in a sentence than any 800 page tome written by an observer. Biographies, it seems to me, give a new perspective, but do fairly little to express the essence of a human being.

Susan Sontag wrote about things We were interested in. Now, through Moser, she speaks again and we are interested in Her.

I urge everyone who is considering reading this book, or has seen this review among many other glowing essays, to see another side of Moser's work in Magdalena Edwards's recent piece in the LA Review of Books, "Benjamin Moser and the Smallest Woman in the World." Edwards was contracted by Moser in a translation project of Lispector's work, and found Moser's managerial style bullying and ethically suspect. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/benjamin-moser-and-the-smallest-woman-in-the-world/ At the very least, even if you find Moser's behavior within the limits of professional conduct in his editorial role, Edwards raises a lot of questions that might enrich your reading, about authorship and ownership, and how well anyone can know another person's intentions (even with all the archival material in the world). Certainly this new biography, with its unprecedented access into Sontag's archive, will be considered authoritative. It might even be compelling, well-written, passionately argued, etc. I will probably buy a copy, or borrow one. But in my mind, it is more than worth it to see how the sausage was made, and to be able to keep space for the silenced (female) voices along the wayside.

My attic is still packed with old copies of Commentary Magazine, Partisan Review, The Public Interest, the New Republic and the New York Review of Books with articles by the likes of Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Lionel Abel, Steven Marcus, Robert Warshow, Robert Brustein, Diana Trilling, Elliot Cohen, William Phillips, Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Robert Silvers, Norman Podhoretz, Jason Epstein, Theodore Solotaroff, James Q. Wilson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Baldwin and Midge Decter. It wasn't just Susan Sontag who was interesting and informative. All of them -- and the many harsh, brutal and long-lasting arguments between them -- were. Many of them were Jewish, and we have yet to find satisfactory replacements for any of them.