No one held Susan Sontag in higher esteem than she did: Her Life reviewed

Towards the end of this tale of imperial intellectual expansion, Susan Sontag’s publicist goes to visit his shrink and, dealing with some appalling professional trauma or other, mentions her name. The psychiatrist bursts out laughing. The publicist asks what is so funny and is told: ‘You can’t imagine how many people have sat on that couch over the years and talked about Susan Sontag.’

Benjamin Moser’s very substantial life of the cultural critic and writer is capable of detached bemusement at its subject’s unstoppable advance. She took herself extremely seriously. (‘On 3 October, the Nobel Prize was awarded to J.M. Coetzee. The award depressed Susan.’) The surprising thing is that she persuaded her world to take her at her own estimation, through threats, intimidation, browbeating and harangues, lovingly detailed by Moser.

Those weaker of will in her immediate circle had unenviable lives. They might find that they had handed over $8 million; they might arrive for a date with Sontag at a plush New York restaurant to be presented with a colossal bill for her caviar supper, the genius herself having impatiently departed; they might find that being employed as her assistant involved having to bathe her with disinfectants because of her total neglect of personal hygiene.

Those a little further away believed, as Susan did, that she was the great genius of the age, and discovered, to the profit of New York psychiatrists, that she had taken up permanent residence among their incurable anxieties. ‘I even heard her describe herself on the phone, comparing herself to Joan of Arc,’ one long-suffering intimate recorded.

We shouldn’t write off Sontag. She remains a substantial cultural critic, with some essays of considerable interest. ‘Notes on Camp’, ‘Against Interpretation’, and the books on photography and on illness are still worth reading. She certainly did a good deal to direct the American public’s attention to a range of topics outside its usual field.