The Professor and Other Writings (13 page)

And invariably she would probe for Sapphic gossip—sometimes about opera singers and pop stars, sometimes about other writers. Was it true what everyone said about the late Tatiana Troyanis? What
about Eleanor Steber? And Brigitte Fassbaender? Or Lucia Popp, for that matter? (
Of course, Terry, the perfect Queen of the Night.
) Did I think Iris Murdoch and Brigid Brophy had had an affair? What was Adrienne Rich's girlfriend like? When was somebody ever going to spill the beans on Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen?

Was there some way, I wonder now, that she wanted me to absolve her? Was the fact that she never mentioned, on any of the occasions we talked, her equally prominent female companion (they lived in the same Manhattan building) a sign of grande dame sophistication or some sort of weird test of my character? (Actually I did hear her say her name once; when someone at an otherwise fairly staid farewell dinner gave Sontag a vulgar present at the end of her Stanford visit—a book of glossy photos of the campy 1950s pin-up, Bettie Page—she said: “I'll have to show these to Annie.”)

I was never quite sure what she wanted. And besides, whatever it was, after a while she stopped wanting it. I visited her several times in New York City and even got invited to the London Terrace penthouse to see the famous book collection. (
Of course, Terry, mine is the greatest library in private hands in the world.
) I tried not to gape at the Brice Mardens stacked up against the wall and enthused appropriately when she showed me prized items, such as Beckford's own annotated copy of
Vathek
. We would go on little culture jaunts. Once she took me to the Strand bookstore (the clerk said “Hi, Susan” in enviably blasé tones); another time she invited me to a film festival she was curating at the Japan Society. But there were also little danger signals, ominous hints that she was tiring of me. One day in the Village, after having insisted on buying me a double-decker ice cream cone, she suddenly vanished, even as I, tongue moronically extruded, was still licking away. I turned around in bewilderment and saw her black-clad form piling, without farewell, into a yellow cab.

And the last two times I saw her I managed to blow it—horrendously—both times. The first debacle occurred after one of the films
at the Japan Society. I'd been hanging nervously around in the lobby, like a groupie, waiting for her; Sontag yanked me into a taxi with her and an art curator she knew named Klaus. (He was hip and bald and dressed in the sort of all-black outfit worn by the fictional German talk-show host, Dieter Sprocket, on the old
Saturday Night Live
.) With great excitement she explained she was taking me out for “a real New York evening,” to a dinner party being hosted by Marina Abramovic, the performance artist, at her loft in SoHo. Abramovic had recently been in the news for having lived for twelve days, stark naked, on an exposed wooden platform (fitted with shower and toilet) in the window of the Sean Kelly Gallery. She lived on whatever food spectators donated and never spoke during the entire twelve days. I guess it had all been pretty mesmerizing; my friend Nancy happened to be there once when Abramovic took a shower, and one of Nancy's friends hit the jackpot—she got to watch the artist have a bowel movement.

Abramovic—plus hunky sculptor boyfriend—lived in a huge, virtually empty loft, the sole furnishings being a dining table and chairs in the very center of the room and a spindly old stereo from the 1960s. The space was probably a hundred feet on either side:
major real estate, of course
, as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved using
Vanity Fair
–ish clichés.) She and Abramovic smothered one another in hugs and kisses. I meanwhile blanched in fright: I'd just caught sight of two of the other guests who, alarmingly enough, turned out to be Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. Reed (O great rock god of my twenties) stood morosely by himself, humming, doing little dance steps and playing air guitar. Periodically he glared at everyone—including me—with apparent hatred. Anderson—elfin spikes of hair perfectly gelled—was chatting up an Italian man from the Guggenheim, the man's trophy wife, and the freakish-looking lead singer from the cult art-pop duo Fischerspooner. The last-mentioned had just come back from performing at the Pompidou
Center and wore booties and tights, a psychedelic shawl and a thing like a codpiece. He could have played Osric in a postmodern
Hamlet
. He was accompanied by a bruiser with a goatee—roadie or boyfriend, it wasn't clear—and emitted girlish little squeals when our first course, a foul-smelling durian fruit just shipped in from Malaysia, made its way to the table.

Everyone crowded into their seats: despite the vast size of the room, we were an
intime
gathering. Yet it wouldn't be quite right merely to say that everyone ignored me. As a non-artist and non-celebrity, I was so “not there,” it seemed—so cognitively unassimilable—I wasn't even registered enough to be ignored. I sat at one end of the table like a piece of antimatter. I didn't exchange a word the whole night with Lou Reed, who sat kitty-corner across from me. He remained silent and surly. Everyone else gabbled happily on, however, about how they loved to trash hotels when they were younger and how incompetent everybody was at the Pompidou.
At my show I had to explain things to them a thousand times. They just don't know how to do a major retrospective.

True, Sontag tried briefly to call the group's attention to me (with the soul-destroying words,
Terry is an English professor
); and Abramovic kindly gave me a little place card to write my name on. But otherwise I might as well not have been born. My one conversational gambit failed dismally: when I asked the man from the Guggenheim, to my right, what his books were about, he regarded me disdainfully and began,
I am famous for
—, then caught himself. He decided to be more circumspect—he was the
world's leading expert on Arte Povera
—but then turned his back on me for the next two hours. At one point I thought I saw Laurie Anderson, at the other end of the table, trying to get my attention; she was smiling sweetly in my direction, as if to undo my pathetic isolation. I smiled in gratitude in return and held up my little place card so she would at least know my name. Annoyed, she gestured back impatiently, with a sharp downward flick
of her index finger; she wanted me to pass the wine bottle. I was reduced to a pair of disembodied hands, like the ones that come out of the walls and give people drinks in Cocteau's
Beauty and the Beast
.

Sontag gave up trying to include me and after a while seemed herself to recede curiously into the background. Maybe she was already starting to get sick again; she seemed oddly undone. Through much of the conversation (dominated by glammy Osric) she looked tired and bored, almost sleepy. She did not react when I finally decided to leave—on my own—just after coffee had been served. I thanked Marina Abramovic, who led me to the grungy metal staircase that went down to the street and back to the world of the Little People. Turning round one last time, I saw Sontag still slumped in her seat, as if she'd fallen into a trance, or somehow just caved in. She'd clearly forgotten all about me.

A fiasco, to be sure, but my final encounter with Sontag was possibly more disastrous, my Waterloo. I had come to New York with Blakey, and Sontag (to whom I wanted proudly to display her) said we could stop by her apartment one afternoon. When we arrived at the appointed time, clutching a large bouquet of orange roses, Sontag was nowhere to be seen. Her young male assistant, padding delicately around in his socks, showed us in, took the roses away, and whispered to us to wait in the living room. We stood in puzzled silence. Half an hour later, somewhat blowsily, Sontag finally emerged from a back room. I introduced her to Blakey, and said rather nervously that I hoped we hadn't woken her up from a nap. It was as if I had accused her of never having read Proust, or of watching soap operas all day. Her face instantly darkened and she snapped at me violently.
Why on earth did I think she'd been having a nap? Didn't I know she never had naps? Of course she wasn't having a nap! She would never have a nap! Never in a million years! What a stupid remark to make! How had I gotten so stupid? A nap—for God's sake!

She calmed down after a bit and became vaguely nice to Blakey—
Blakey had just read her latest piece on photography in
The New Yorker
and was complimenting her effusively on it—but it was clear I couldn't repair the damage I'd done. Indeed, I made it worse. Sontag asked B. if she had read
The Volcano Lover
and started in on a monologue (one I'd heard before) about her literary reputation. It had fallen slightly over the past decade, she allowed—foolishly, people had yet to grasp the greatness of her fiction—but of course it would rise again dramatically,
as soon as I am dead
. The same thing had happened, after all, to Virginia Woolf, and didn't we agree Woolf was a great genius? In a weak-minded attempt at levity, I asked her if she “really” thought
Orlando
a work of genius. She then exploded.
Of course not!
she shouted, hands flailing and face white with rage.
Of course not! You don't judge a writer by her worst work! You judge her by her best work!
I reeled backwards as if I'd been struck; Blakey looked embarrassed. The assistant peeked out from another room to see what was going on. Sontag went on muttering for a while, then grimly said she had to go. With awkward thanks, we bundled ourselves hurriedly into the elevator and out onto West 24th Street—Blakey agog, me all nervy and smarting. When I sent Sontag a copy of my lesbian anthology a few months later, a thousand pages long and complete with juicy Highsmith excerpt, I knew she would never acknowledge it, nor did she.

Enfin—la fin
. I heard she was dead as Bev and I were driving back from my mother's after Christmas. Blakey called on the cell phone from Chicago to say she had just read about it online; it would be on the front page of
The New York Times
the next day. It was, but news of the Asian tsunami crowded it out. (The catty thing to say here would be that Sontag would have been annoyed at being upstaged; the honest thing to say is that she wouldn't have been.) The
Times
did another piece a few days later, a somewhat dreary set of passages from her books, entitled “No Hard Books, or Easy Deaths.” (An odd title: her death wasn't easy, but she was all about hard books.) And in the
weeks since,
The New Yorker
,
New York Review of Books
, and various other highbrow mags have kicked in with the predictable tributes.

But I've had the feeling the real reckoning has yet to begin. The reaction, to my mind, has been a bit perfunctory and stilted. A good part of her characteristic “effect”—what one might call her novelistic charm—has not yet been put into words. Among other things, Sontag was a great comic character; Dickens or Flaubert or James would have had a field day with her. The carefully cultivated moral seriousness—strenuousness might be a better word—coexisted with a fantastical, Mrs. Jellyby–like absurdity. Sontag's complicated and charismatic sexuality was part of this comic side of her life. The high-mindedness, the high-handedness, commingled with a love of gossip, drollery, and seductive acting out—and, when she was in a benign and unthreatened mood, a fair amount of ironic self-knowledge.

I think she was fully conscious of, and took great pride and pleasure in, the erotic spell she exerted over other women. I would be curious to know how men found her in this regard; the few times I saw her with men around, they seemed to relate to her as a kind of intellectually supercharged eunuch. The famed “Natalie Wood” looks of her early years notwithstanding, she seemed uninterested in being an object of heterosexual desire, and males responded accordingly. It was not the same with women, and least of all with her lesbian fans. Among the susceptible, she never lost her sexual majesty. She was quite fabulously butch—perhaps the Butchest One of All. She knew it and basked in it, like a big lady she-cat in the sun.

Perhaps at some point there will be, too, a better and less routine accounting of her extraordinary cultural significance. Granted, Great Man (or Great Woman) theories of history have been out of fashion for some time now. No single person, it's usually argued, has that much effect on how things eventually turn out. Yet it is hard for me to think about the history of modern feminism, say—especially as it evolved in the United States in the 1970s—without Sontag in
the absolutely central, catalytic role. Simone de Beauvoir was floating around too, of course, but for intellectually ambitious American women of my generation, women born in the 1940s and '50s, the Frenchwoman seemed both culturally unfamiliar and emotionally removed. Sontag, on the contrary, was there: on one's own college campus, lecturing on Barthes or Canetti or Benjamin or Tsvetaeva or Leni Riefenstahl. (And who were they? One pretended to know, then scuttled around to find out.) She was our very own Great Man. If there was ever going to be a Smart Woman Team then Sontag would have to be both Captain and Most Valuable Player. She was the one already out there doing the job, even as we were laboring painfully to get up off the floor and match wits with her.

In my own case, Sontag's death brings with it mixed emotions. God, she could be insulting to people. At the end—as I enjoyed blubbering to friends—she was
weally weally mean to me
! But her death also leaves me now with a profound sense of imploding fantasies, of huge convulsions in the underground psychic plates. Not once, unfortunately, on any of her California trips did Sontag ever come to my house, though I often sat around scheming how to get her to accept such an invitation.
If only she would come
, I thought,
I would be truly happy
. It's hard to admit how long—and how abjectly, like a Victorian monomaniac—I carried this fantasy around. (It long antedated my actual meeting with her.) It is still quite palpable in the rooms in which I spend most of my time. Just about every book, every picture, every object in my living room, for example, I now see all too plainly, has been placed there strategically in the hope of capturing her attention, of pleasing her mind and heart, of winning her love, esteem, intellectual respect, etc., etc. It's all baited and set up: a room-sized Venus flytrap, courtesy of T-Ball/Narcissism Productions.