Over the last couple of years, American writer and intellectual, Susan Sontag, has been experiencing a “rediscovery,” as evidenced by Benjamin Moser’s 2019 biography of Sontag (the subject of this conversation with Sheila Heti), as well as the much talked about 2019 Met exhibition, Camp: Notes on Fashion, that took as its theme Sontag’s highly influential 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” And as part of the podcast series, Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA, TPL released its own four-part episode of Sontag herself talking in 2001 with Evan Solomon at the International Festival of Authors (now called TIFA) to celebrate the release of her book, In America. This is the conversation that Sheila Heti references when this conversation here with Ben Moser begins and Heti exclaims that she “she was so fierce, she was so terrifying, and I've never forgotten it, all these years…” Benjamin Moser is the author of Sontag: A Life. Moser was born in Houston. He is the author of Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book. For his work bringing Clarice Lispector to international prominence, he received Brazil’s first State Prize for Cultural Diplomacy. He has published translations from French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. A former books columnist for Harper's Magazine and The New York Times Book Review, he has also written for The New Yorker, Conde Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books. Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including Motherhood, How Should a Person Be? which was a New York Times Notable Book and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker. She is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes, and is the former Interviews Editor for The Believer magazine. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Harper's, and n+1.
*Note: given the current temporary closure of TPL due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have made our best efforts to offer suggestions below for materials which are part our online collections, and available at home to anyone with a current Toronto Public Library card.
Why are wait time for ebooks or audiobooks sometimes so long? Learn more about limits on the number of eBook copies and the length of time they can be borrowed.
Books by Benjamin Moser
Sontag: Her Life and Work (ebook)
Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector (translated by Moser) (ebook)
The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector (edited by Moser) (ebook)
Books by Sheila Heti
Women in Clothes (ebook)
Motherhood (print book available when branches reopen)
“My Life is a Joke” (link opens a 2015 story by Heti in The New Yorker)
Materials by or about Susan Sontag
Debriefing: Collected Stories by Susan Sontag
As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (of Susan Sontag), 1964-1980
Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
On the Eve of the Met Gala, Andrew Bolton Takes Vogue on a Walking Tour of “Camp: Notes on Fashion” (link opens a Vogue magazine article from May 2019)
Writers Off the Page: 40 Years of TIFA podcast
A four-part Interview with Susan Sontag (can be listened to in any order)
Episode One: This God-Damned Celebrity Culture (23 mins)
Episode Two: The Little Illness Book (19 mins)
Episode Three: The Arts Give Humans Dignity (19 mins)
Episode Four: Make Something Better (19 mins)
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations features curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches. Episodes are produced by Natalie Kertes, Jorge Amigo, and Gregory McCormick. Technical support by Michelle De Marco and George Panayotou. AV support by Jennifer Kasper and Mesfin Bayssassew. Marketing support by Tanya Oleksuik.
Music is by The Worst Pop Band Ever.
Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations
Benjamin Moser: The Life of Susan Sontag
Gregory McCormick (GM): Welcome to Live Mic: Best of TPL Conversations, our regular Toronto Public Library podcast series featuring curated discussions and interviews with some of today’s best-known and yet-to-be-known writers, thinkers and artists, recorded on stage at one of Toronto Public Library’s 100 branches.
[applause]
Sheila Heti (SH): Oh yeah, yeah. This is so funny. I actually saw that Evan Solomon interview with Susan Sontag at IAFLA and she came on stage... She was before she even came on stage and Evan Solomon introduced her and he called her fierce and said that she was a very daunting person to interview because of her intellect and he went on like that, and she came on stage and immediately started yelling at him and saying, "You would not say that if I was a man, you would not call me fierce", but she was so fierce, she was so terrifying, and I've never forgotten it, all these years, it was... But you seem to suggest in the biography that that is not an atypical thing for her to have done.
Benjamin Moser (BM): No, she was fierce, I think. [chuckle] I think we can say that now that she's no longer with us to counter that, and she did counter it and she was often very aggressive in her public presentation and a lot of people found this awful, and really hated her for it, and other people were very inspired by it. But I mean you said you were sort of inspired by it.
SH: Yeah.
BM: You thought it was kind of cool.
SH: Oh yeah, it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
BM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a kind of majesty to this to performance of invulnerability and of power and of knowing everything and knowing everyone and knowing, having read every book and gone to every opera. I think what's fascinating about learning about her for these seven years that I've worked on this book is just how uncertain she actually was. This was a mask for a very insecure person, a very unsure person and somebody who to a certain extent created this mask of power and invulnerability in order to disguise something that was very deep inside her, and that was a kind of insecurity that I think we all recognize 'cause we're all insecure in certain ways and in certain times, but Sontag grew up really without any models. Her mother was an alcoholic who didn't really talk to her, her father had died in China when she was five, she grew up in a bookless world of middle America and so she was always looking for models for how should a person be and she was someone who found that often in the great female monster figures, starting with Mediya and going all the way through Joan of Arc and Sarah Bernhardt and Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford.
BM: She was a film buff and she... That's sort of who she looked to in order to figure out how to be in the world and it was a great self-creation. Americans often thought of her as very European because she was so sophisticated and because she was someone who brought the English-speaking world news of developments that were happening in Romania or Germany, or France. But in fact, I think that devotion to self-invention, and self-reinvention is an incredibly American thing about her.
SH: It's interesting seeing the inside which I guess started when her son published her diaries to see how much she created herself. And I kept having this question as I was reading the book, like that insecurity that you see in the diaries, we sort of say that's the real self and that the mask is this persona and it's not as real as the person in her diaries. For the first time, reading this biography, I had this feeling like, why do we say that? Why do we say that the self, the insecure self, her perception of herself is more true than our perception of her?
BM: I couldn't agree more. I think that, I think if you've ever been to a great theatre performance, if you've ever seen a great actress, if you've ever seen a great singer, Maria Callas as Norma is in some ways much more fascinating than Maria Callas washing her dishes. We have this kind of idea that the homely normal day-to-day self is the real person and the public person is fake in some degree. And I don't think that Sontag's performance of what became Susan Sontag in quotes as I say in a couple of times in Notes on 'Camp', she says that Camp is not a woman, it's a woman. I think that there's something deeply authentic about it, there's something deeply moving about it and it was absolutely influential for generations of intellectuals particularly women, and particularly Lesbians who didn't have any role models and who didn't know what it was like to see a woman eat a man alive on stage in the way that you saw. This was something that she came up into a context where there were no, there was one female role model for intellectual girls, and that was Madam Curie who...
BM: And it's funny that Carolyn Heilbrun says this in her book, Writing a Woman's Life, that until 1970 there were no lives that a girl looking to study, be an academic, be a writer, be a scientist could look to except for that one. And Sontag, now, we're two generations on from Sontag, and it's quite common to think there's lots of female professors in academics and writers and women in all sorts of positions of power but there weren't when she was growing up, and even in her generation already, I talk about Camille Paglia sort of stalking her in the '70s, which is a funny story about how she's coming up to Vermont to visit this... To talk and how Camille was worrying about what to wear, and she was completely obsessed with what tone to take and what she was gonna talk about at dinner and all this stuff. And Sontag was actually only in her late 30s at that time, and she had already come to symbolize this for this younger woman intellectual, so...
BM: Yeah, does it matter that much that she was insecure? Everybody's insecure. It's not that fascinating to a certain extent. And the performance is real, I think.
SH: And really different from what anyone else could do.
BM: A lot of people try to be grand and difficult.
[laughter]
BM: You know, and they didn't have the success that Sontag did.
SH: 'Cause they didn't have the learning that she had. It was interesting, I wanna read you this quote from... You quote this contemporary cultural critic, Mark Griffe in your book. And he's somebody who takes Sontag as one of his models of how to write. And one of the things that he said in this, I wanna read it because... Yeah, so he says, "In the early Sontag that is part of her greatness too. She's winding herself up to this position of glorious falsity and speaking through a mask and yet there's no doubt you can hear her through the mask and that she's still just Susan and yet the mask tells you she is not Susan, not now, she's the God, the God is speaking." I like that, I don't see how we Atheists are gonna discover anything if we don't speak as gods, who else will the gods be. And that is kind of... And then he goes on to talk about how every other academic that he reads tries to prove that they've read everything. And his real question was, "Did she read everything, or didn't she?" because in her essay, she leaves out a lot of those clues that you know, where you try to build up your case. She just says it, You know?
BM: Yeah, and she was very... She told other people to do that too. She said nobody cares about your footnotes. Just speak as if you know what you're talking about. And we were saying, "Fake it till you make it." But she didn't fake it, she really... Her library is an unbelievable... This library is probably bigger but not by much. She really did read everything and it's incredible that you can pick out a book anywhere and see her notes in it. But I think that it's interesting to look at the creation of the certainty that she projects. It does come from a depth of learning that very few people had. What you said about, or what he said about the voice that you hear, there's a famous thing, it's now famous in an interesting way because there was an article written about the book in The Guardian about two months ago, about my discovery that she wrote her husband's first book.
SH: Yeah.
BM: She was married to Philip Rieff who was an older professor whom she met and got engaged to after knowing for a week. She was 17. We sort of know how the marriage is gonna end when we hear those statistics [chuckle] But she was looking for someone to orient her in a world of culture, in a world of learning that she was aspiring to as a young student, and to make a very long story short, she writes this book. And there's all sorts of evidence for this. But I think the funny, funny and least palpable form of evidence, but most convincing for me, having read all of her work so many times, of being so familiar with that voice that's like always one step removed, is you can just tell it's her talking. And that's so funny, because you can't really explain why it is, it's just if you know somebody's voice, you know it's hers, but she's always hiding behind a mask. In fact, when she's writing pseudonymously in this case, her voice comes out even more strongly than when she's writing under her own name. So it's sort of a mystery.
SH: What do you make of... 'cause Dave Hickey reviewed the journals when they came out and he said that David her son left out the most interesting things. He left out all the books that she read. And what we wanna know from Susan Sontag is what were all the books she read. What were all the movies you saw. And that his edit... You're probably the only other person who read all her journals. You read 100 journals, like what would you...
BM: 100 volumes.
SH: What would you make of his edit of...
BM: Well, he's absolutely right in a certain way. If you look at the journals in the archive and you actually open them, and I had it on my computer, I had the FSG version of the journals as they were published. And if you look at them, the elisions and deletions are very subtle, they're not huge chunks that are gone, they're very little pieces that are gone. And so you see a sort of self-presentation of a self-presentation of a self-presentation, and it gets very complicated. I think Sontag was a great maker of lists, and so I do understand that, of her decision to omit some of those lists. Because sometimes she will put a list of 500 words or something that she's learning that week. And you think... Do you really need to publish all these? Dave Hickey's criticism of that, I think was also really interesting, but I can also see from an obscure perspective that you would think, "Do we need 43 pages of brands of soap or whatever?"
BM: Sontag loved lists. And a lot of her great essays are lists. And Notes on Camp is a list for example, of what she is not saying, what is saying is the gay sensibility, how can you tell someone's gay? It's kind of funny, it's like how can you tell she wrote this book 'cause you can just kinda tell, but once you say, "Oh well I can tell you're gay," you can't really define it. You can just... As soon as you start talking about that you fall into stereotypes and you fall into cliches and it offends people. And yet at the same time, there is something there. And the lists that she keeps are her sign posts, and I love them. One of the things I did, you should all Google this, if you feel like 500 hours of cultural improvement, there's a list of her favorite films in the New Yorker. It's a list of 50 great films. And I had never seen these films actually. A few of them here and there you've seen because you've been out in the world. But actually Sontag, if you look at the cover of the book, she looks so contemporary, but actually this picture is 50 years old.
BM: And so when you're writing about her, you're often writing about concepts that have really, really changed and that are not even comprehensible. When you talk about gay people, you have to realize that when she was growing up, gay people did not exist, they were absolutely invisible and they were not spoken of in most of the world including in the places where you would think.
BM: Toronto or Los Angeles, totally invisible and often illegal. So when you're trying to figure out her own sensibility, these lists are real guide. So I watched all these 50 movies, her top 50 movies and some of them are really for me with my background and my being from a different generation, I really couldn't quite enter into them and I couldn't really understand them, but a lot of them were so fantastic and so great. And one of the fun things about Sontag and about reading her and reading about her is that you can educate yourself in a way that I don't think there's another modern writer that gives you the key to culture, in the sense that she does. She gives you a key to film, literature, politics, sexuality, dance, music, different countries and their literatures. It's an unbelievable range of stuff. And so I do like those lists because they, I found them just really one of the most interesting things about her.
SH: Yeah, one of the things that I felt reading your biography was a kind, she talks about, I'm drinking from a 1000 straws or I'm sipping from a 1000 straws, this, the nights that she would go out, she would see four movies in a day or she would go to four openings and it was just this insatiable desire to take in culture. She hated the fact that she had to sleep. There was just... But it makes... It made me nauseous like how much she took in, it was just like an all you can eat buffet and when I was thinking 'cause obviously one of the struggles for her was that she wanted to be a great artist or a great novelist and what she was was a great critic and reading the book, that, the fact that she took in so much art that was the real evidence for me of the difference between the critic and the artist, 'cause most artists I know are really selective about what they can take in, and it's like you have to preserve a certain amount of silence in your head, and a certain amount of space in order for the imagination to do its work. And maybe you can read one book or see one movie, but you can't see 50 movies in a month, and also make work, it seems to me.
BM: No, well, she did, it's amazing that she did, it's amazing that she did anything, concerning how many books she read and how many film she saw and how many...
SH: But I mean imaginative world.
BM: It's very hard, I mean, I think that she was absolutely... Someone says I quote in the book that she said to him, they were in a Chinese restaurant and she said, "I would rather live with any person in this room picked out at random than live by myself", because she did not like to be alone and she was actually quite scared of it, and at the same time, culturally, it was a similar thing. I think that she's very interested in the critic is artist and the critic is artist is something that we've sort of forgotten about because we think that creative work as she did, you have poetry and you have fiction and that's sort of better than non-fiction or history or biography, but in fact, she came from a world intellectually, that was basically a Freudian world in which the interpreter is actually superior to the creator because in Freudianism, in psychoanalysis, the creator doesn't actually really know what he or she is doing, or they think they're doing one thing, but actually, the cigar is not really a cigar. [chuckle] And so there's always this question of what is really going on and that I think is really fascinating.
BM: It's something we've kind of lost sight of, at the same time, she did have this discontent with her own creation, which I find quite sad as her, I hope her champion and her representatives and she's not here with us, to a certain extent, I can talk about her and I can hope that people will go to her work. She is someone who is unhappy with her achievement because she does absorb this idea and I just sort of want her to like her work more and she's very unhappy with it. And actually, we were talking about this earlier, when she would leave the United States and this was in the days before the internet, she was much less guarded in her interviews, when she would come abroad, than when she was at home where she had this very tight performance of herself. And one of the very funny interviews that she did was in Toronto and it's funny that now Toronto to New York is not... There's no difference, 'cause it's on the internet, and somebody would tweet it and it wouldn't matter where it was published, but this was 20 years ago.
BM: And she starts talking about how terrible her essays are and how it's so outmoded and what she really is doing is writing fiction and this is her real vocation, and she expresses it much more affirmatively than she would have done in the United States, rubbishing her old work. But there's always that discontent, and it's kind of you live with someone for seven years, night and day, and you're always, and you're going through their lives with them and you see them making mistakes, you think like, "Oh god, don't sleep with her. That's gonna be a disaster." 'cause you know what's gonna happen and she doesn't know it's gonna happen. So it's sort of unfair in that sense, but one of the things that I like... I just... I wish she had been more happy with her own achievement because it was a great achievement and it did inspire so many people.
SH: What would you say, 'cause you also wrote a biography of Clarice Lispector. Was she happy with her achievement? Is anyone happy?
BM: Yes.
SH: She was?
BM: Fascinatingly, I knew Clarice Lispector's sister who, if anyone here has a Jewish grandmother like we do, this woman, it was so funny 'cause my grandmother was from Texas, and I just thought she was my grandmother and then I met Tanya, Clarice's sister, and she was the Brazilian second printing of my grandmother. It was so funny, it makes sense of course, they all sort of came ultimately from the similar culture and similar places in Eastern Europe and I... She was very sweet and she was very, she always wanted me to have another Diet Coke and she was always serving me cake and the maid was always coming in and she was fretting about, "You don't look so healthy. Are you sure you're eating enough?" and all that kind of stuff, that if you have a Jewish grandmother you're familiar with, but she was, so she was sort of a nice grandma person, but I said to her, I asked her this question, I said, "Do you think Clarice knew what she had done?", and her face changed completely and she said, she knew perfectly well that she had left an unequalled heritage to this nation. And it was this silence in the... I was absolutely... She was very vehement about this, and so that made me very happy because I thought that was a very suffering life as well. But she knew that she had done something and she died at 56 and...
BM: She would have done more but she did know what she had done. I don't think Sontag ever knew there's a story in the book where she's dying in the hospital, she's had this transplant and her agent comes in and he said, oh, I'm sorry to disturb you if you were asleep and she's, no I'm not asleep, I'm not asleep I'm working, I'm working, I'm working and she was dreaming in this delirium with the dying about working and not having lived up to what she wanted to be and I find that heart-breaking.
SH: I'm curious because what's it like to... How do your feelings change? So you spend seven years with her, the Clarice Lispector biography that was your passion project, you fell in love with her work and you wanted to write it, this was a given to you, what's the difference between writing about somebody that you come to with love versus... I don't know how you came to Sontag, what your feelings about her were before you got the commission but what were they and then how did they change over this seven years of working on it now, how do you even start a biography of somebody like Susan Sontag?
BM: I still don't know, to be honest, I can't believe actually wrote this book 'cause it's so complicated and it's just so massive of the subject and I had come to Clarice out of my own interests and I was fascinated by this world of the great female intellectuals, I thought there was a lot to be excited about there, I thought there was a lot that was not being said about it and I really got this feeling and the more I got into Clarice's life if that was in Brazil it was a different culture but actually the position of women, we're not talking about Saudi Arabia but we're talking about western countries in Europe and North America, Latin America its actually more similar than it was different and I thought there was a lot to be excited about there and I thought there was a lot to be shocked by there too, I was really shocked by it and I think you'll read in the book if you do there's a lot of stuff that is really hard for us to take on board right now and two or three generations later my love for Clarice though, that was a very deep it's still is a very deep emotion in my soul and I didn't think I could do it again 'cause it was such...
BM: It was like marrying somebody and then I was offered the opportunity to have this access to her archives and to all this stuff and because I was interested in maybe I was interested in women writers in general I jumped at it, it was a huge honor as an American to be asked to write about Susan Sontag is a really big honor and it's a really big responsibility, I had read her, I hadn't read... It's so weird 'cause at the end what I know about Susan Sontag is so much that I actually probably know more about Susan Sontag than she did in a certain way because when I was going through some old emails 'cause I was a switching email accounts and moving some emails, I see stuff that I wrote in 2013 I don't even know who the person is, I don't remember what this is all about, I can kind of go through the chain and remember it but we live our lives forward and the biographer looks backward and I don't remember necessarily what I might have said to somebody when I was 12 years old but if somebody has a record of that then the biographer sees that.
BM: So it's an unfair position because you're also talking to someone who not only is not alive and can't talk back to you but somebody who even if she were alive wouldn't necessarily even know what you were talking about because she wouldn't remember and it's astonishing just going through these emails how much I've forgotten from just a few years ago and my not my knowledge of Sontag now compared to what it was when I started, I had read on photography, I had read the course reinterpretation, I had read on its metaphor I think in college and I think like so many people if you go into a book store and you see even the authors you've read and liked but haven't read all their work and don't really know that much about but thought, oh I should go back and read that.
BM: We were talking about Margaret Atwood last and I interviewed her once in Texas and I had read a few of her books and it turns out she written like 50 books or something and when you interview you're like, uh, do I have to read all this and it's completely different and when you do that somebody else emerges from the person that you would have known if you had read two books so I loved the opportunity because it's so rewarding to go that deep into somebody's work, it's so exciting and it's just so... You can't do it for everyone, maybe Sontag probably would have done that to everyone, she probably would have read the complete works of every author but for those of us who do sleep it's hard and it's really exciting to get to know a person this way.
SH: Okay, here's something Kris Crows read the book and she said that the book describes the extent and limits of her genius, can you talk, having read everything she's written what the extent and limits are of her genius?
BM: Well, the extent are what we've been talking about. This woman who had written about in some form or another just about every theme that I think is essential to modern society, I guess she doesn't really write about economic it's interesting, she doesn't really write about race but pretty much everything else it's all in there and it's fascinating to see it all unfold and I think that the limits are basically self-imposed by a self discontent that she has and some of that, if not most of that I think comes from her sexuality.
BM: She's gay in a time when people are not allowed to be gay, her childhood was almost taken away from her because she was gay, this was... People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they lost their livelihoods, they lost their lives and we still today gay kids kill themselves more than straight kids by a large degree and so we're talking about a time when this was very dangerous. I think that her inability to say, I this is a feminist critique that emerges in the '70s that you can't say the body, this is Adrienne Rich saying this, it's not the body it's my body that you're supposed to speak from your experience and this is something that limits the temptation to grandiosity in terms it limits the uses of allegory and metaphor which is something sometimes profoundly interesting. I think that when the winds shifted in the 80s with AIDS she was unable to come along with that for all sorts of reasons that I completely understand, I'm a gay person myself and I know that it's not always easy.
BM: For a lot of people to be gay, whether even if they don't come from repressive religious backgrounds or hateful families, which a lot of people do, there are all these obstacles. And I do think when you start looking at her relationships which are consistently unhappy and often very abusive, she, her energy, a lot of energy that I wish, again, looking back and kind of knowing how it's gonna end, it's a position that's unfair to her, but I do know how these end. I just wish that she could have been a little bit happier in her personal life and less fraught, and I think that the piece to that might have brought her, would have bought a different kind of writing forth, but at the same time, I like that her writing is so tense. It's coiled, it's like ready to pounce. She pounced on that interviewer. It's kind of exciting to see where she's gonna go next, and I think that a calm, tranquil, peaceful person would have been a completely different person. So I'm pretty much in favor of letting people be who they wanna be and making the mistakes that we all make, but in our own special way.
SH: Yeah, I'm interested also, well, you were talking about her relationships and her friendships.
BM: Yeah.
SH: And especially in her friendships with younger writers and how she was sort of a critic of them and telling them what to read and one of my favorite anecdotes in the book is, her friendship with the interviewer Michael Silverblatt and she tells him that he has to throw out his toys.
BM: Isn't that hilarious?
SH: Yeah, like I guess he collected toys and she's like...
BM: He was allergic.
SH: You have to grow up and...
BM: Yeah, he had been allergic to dust when he was a little boy, and his parents one day because of that, threw away all his stuffed animals, which is so sad, he comes from school, and they're all gone, and so anyway, he grows up, years pass and he's a grown-up and he can collect stuffed animal again, so he collects all these toys and stuff. And Susan just came in, and she said, "I'm not angry with you, but it's gotta stop. You're throwing them away", and he said, it sounds so simple, but it really helped him he said, "It really made me, it gave me some peace with my childhood and it gave me an ability to move on and become a grown up". And she did that and often she would bite your head off. I mean Klaus Biesenbach who was a German curator in Los Angeles, they were in Berlin, it was 3:00 AM, and they were eating hot dogs or something, or donair or whatever you eat in Berlin and it was late. And he's German, and so he speaks excellent English but he made a mistake in a word and she just lost it and started ranting at him and...
BM: And she said, "Remember Klaus, remember, words are important. As a critic, as a curator, that's what you have and you can never sell it, and you can never give it away and you can never let yourself make these kind of mistakes." And he was just out drinking beer with her at 3:00 AM and he said he never forgot it because it was such a valuable lesson. When you're a curator, that's what you have is your taste and your learning and your personality that you bring to this, and you can't always be looking left and looking right, and second-guessing yourself. And she gave him this thing that, this is now 25 years on, and he's the head of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and a very important guy, and that's his leading... What do you call it? His leading star. He always remembers that when he's doing these things, like you can't put the work in the show just because it's some donor or because he, that's guided him through his life and his career.
SH: Can you also talk about Susan Sontag in Sarajevo and putting on... I mean she put on Waiting for Godot, but what I'm interested in is the way that people talk about her in Sarajevo, is so different from the way that people talk about her in New York and how I'm interested in the idea, I don't know if you agree with me or not, but the we're not only who we are, but the place makes a person, and somehow she could be a different person in Sarajevo than she was in New York City. And it sounds like when I read the book, like two different people are being described.
BM: Well, they're not. It's so funny, as Susan when I met her friend, Merrill Roden who was the friend that she writes about that she goes to visit Thomas Mann within a famous short story when they're in college and they had a game about Igor Stravinsky who was still alive, living in California at the time, how many years of their lives were they... How many years could they give to Stravinsky for falling dead there on the spot and they figured out this is like... Anyway, they figured it was for four years for Stravinsky they were willing to die, right then and there, just fall flat, dead on the ground. And that sounds kind of cute and funny, and nerdy high school kids, but in fact, she really did believe that art and culture were worth dying for, and all her life she did and she goes to Sarajevo and she puts on this play in a city where there were no birds, because all the birds had fled, in a city where people walked around with their shit in paper bags because they couldn't flush their toilets.
BM: And so, you would shit in a paper bag and then walk through the city and try to find somewhere to dispose off it, suppose of it, where 10,000 people are murdered, where people are being rounded up and put in concentration camps in full view of CNN and the rest of the world and all these countries that could have done something, and are sort of sitting around just living their lives. And this was an hour from Vienna, it's an hour from Venice, and in that place she found that that little girl who wanted to die for Stravinsky found as an old woman at the end of her life, a usefulness for culture and she goes and she thinks, "These people, they need NATO to come bomb the Serbian positions but they also need to be treated as human beings and what it means to be a human being is to go to a play and read a book", and the meaningfulness that she brought to this day, I was in this market place which is still under a freeway overpass bridge in the middle of the city and it's still there because that's where it moved during the city, during the siege because you wouldn't get murdered while you were shopping for your vegetables. You had this protection and she goes, she goes to Sarajevo and she's this figure that is associated with elite culture.
BM: I'm sure, for Canadians, for Americans, for Europeans, she's associated with very difficult forms of modern art. But I was curious of it and I asked this woman at this market place. I had a translator and I said, ask that woman, she was the most normal-looking woman I could find, she was selling meat and she had a smock with blood on it. It was sort of symbolic, now that I think about it. And I said, "Do you know who Susan Sontag was?" Well, this woman was completely outraged that I would think she wouldn't know who Susan Sontag was. And she said, "Of course. Everybody knows, we absolutely, we venerate here, she came here when nobody believed us, nobody was listening to us, they were letting us get packed off to concentration camps in full view of everybody, nobody cared about our lives, it was like we were scum. And she came and she sat with us and she lived with us and she lived alongside us and she listened to us and she gave us a voice."
BM: And blah-blah-blah-blah-blah, this whole speech, and she would write against interpretation. It was really funny because you see how meaningful Susan had been to this whole city that named the square around the National Theater after her. And so I think that, I always thought of her it's funny when people in New York would complain about her and stuff, and she was a difficult lady. But she, I always thought about the woman in Sarajevo in the market, and I thought, "You know what, you'll get over this, these people like at the New York Times or whatever, you'll move on." But what she... I really think that's her legacy is showing that culture is something that's worth dying for.
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