The Professor and Other Writings (12 page)

I've been home a couple of weeks now. Blakey back in Chicago, her fall term having started a week ahead of ours. Beslan (and Putin) seem to have fallen out of the news. It's now all election stuff, all the time. Margo said okay to up the pills for a while: a somewhat spongy return. The most interesting thing I've done since coming back to San Francisco has been to change my opinion—a full 180 degrees—on Nan Goldin. The
Ballad of Sexual Dependency
lady. I never really liked that book. Too many stringy-looking downtown types in psychic disarray. An odd resentment also of Goldin's art world fame. The whole eighties thing. But the new collection of her most recent photographs,
The Devil's Playground
, has left me stunned by its beauty. It came in the mail from Amazon while we were away, a huge heavy Phaidon volume over two inches thick, and I spent the first evening after I got back with it on my lap, turning the pages over slowly, as if they were made of vellum.

As usual, Goldin photographs her friends—Bruno, Valerie, Joana, Clemens, Simon, Guido—doing all sorts of ordinary but vulnerable human things: kissing or fucking, holding babies, sometimes just smoking, or standing in doorways or lying naked on their beds. The intimacy Goldin establishes with her subjects is extraordinary, almost uncanny, as if she were warming them into life with the camera lens. Luscious pink and gold flesh tones, deep reds, deep blues. Painterliness. Everyone in a kind of sensual dream, except you know it is also real life. Astonishing sequence of “Clemens and Jens” making love
on Goldin's rumpled bed in Paris, one on top of the other. A man
absolutely
inside another man. A hand pressing down on a back. Open mouths. Lunar light. Two Endymions embracing. You see the mole on Jens's left shoulder blade; Clemens's toes curling in ecstasy.

A few self-portraits, too, including some strange bleak ones Goldin took when she was at the Priory, the London drug rehab place. (She'd had an accident and gotten hooked on the morphine she was given as a painkiller.) But even the pictures without people in them are stupendous. Stopped with a little gasp at “Stromboli at dawn, Italy, 1996,” a ravishing experiment in grisaille. Then, too, in the book's final section, another memento mori: “Skulls of monks, Cripta dei Cappuccini, Rome, 2001.” Goldin's love of the world, her dauntlessness and intensity, are awe-inspiring. The last picture in the book is a kindly one and a valediction: “Gravestone in a pet cemetery, Lisbon, 1998.” Shows a tiny gravestone, with dates “27-5-72 à 12-6-86” and the words (in English) “You Never Did Anything Wrong.” Told Wally all about it and she said she felt proud of her species.

Susan Sontag, 1975

A FEW WEEKS AGO
I found myself scanning photographs of Susan Sontag into my screen-saver file: a tiny head shot clipped from
Newsweek
; two that had appeared in
The New York Times
; another printed alongside Allan Gurganus's obituary in the
Advocate
, a glossy American gay and lesbian mag usually devoted to pulchritudinous gym bunnies, gay sitcom stars, and treatments for flesh-eating strep. It seemed the least I could do for the bedazzling, now-dead she-eminence. The most beautiful photo I downloaded was one that Peter Hujar took of her in the 1970s, around the time of
I, Et Cetera.
She's wearing a thin gray turtleneck and lies on her back—arms up, head
resting on her clasped hands and her gaze fixed impassively on something to the right of the frame. There's a slightly pedantic quality to the whole thing that I like, very true to life. Every few hours now she floats up onscreen in this digitized format, supine, sleek, and smooth.

No doubt hundreds (thousands?) of people knew Susan Sontag better than I did. For ten years ours was an on-again, off-again semi-friendship, constricted by role playing and shot through in the end with mutual irritation. Over the years I labored to hide my growing disillusion, especially during my last ill-fated visit to New York, when she regaled me—for the umpteenth time—about the siege of Sarajevo, the falling bombs, and how the pitiful Joan Baez had been too terrified to come out of her hotel room. Sontag flapped her arms and shook her big mannish hair—inevitably described in the press as a “mane”—contemptuously.
That woman is a fake! She tried to fly back to California the next day! I was there for months. Through all of the bombardment, of course, Terry.
Then she ruminated. Had I ever met Baez? Was she a secret lesbian? I confessed that I'd once waited in line behind the folk singer at my cash machine (Baez lives near Stanford) and had taken the opportunity to inspect the hairs on the back of her neck. Sontag, who sensed a rival, considered this non-event for a moment, but after further inquiries, was reassured that I, her forty-something slave girl from San Francisco, still preferred her to Ms. Diamonds and Rust.

At its best, our relationship was rather like the one between Dame Edna and her feeble sidekick Madge, or possibly Stalin and Malenkov. Sontag was the Supremo and I the obsequious gofer. Whenever she came to San Francisco, usually once or twice a year, I instantly became her female aide-de-camp: a one-woman posse, ready to drop anything at a phone call (including the classes I was supposed to be teaching at Stanford) and drive her around to various Tower Records stores and dim sum restaurants. Most important, I became adept at clucking sympathetically at her constant kvetching: about the stupid
ity and philistinism of whatever local sap was paying for her lecture trip, how no one had yet appreciated the true worth of her novel
The Volcano Lover
, how you couldn't find a decent dry cleaner in downtown San Francisco, etc., etc.

True: from my point of view, it had all begun extraordinarily well. Even now I have to confess that, early on, Sontag gave me a couple of the sweetest (not to mention most amusing) moments of my adult life. The first came one gray magical morning at Stanford in 1996, when after several hours of slogging away on student papers, I opened a strange manila envelope that had come for me, with a New York return address. The contents, a brief fan letter about a piece I'd written on Charlotte Brontë and a flamboyantly inscribed paperback copy of her play,
Alice in Bed
(“from Susan”), made me dizzy with ecstasy. Having idolized Sontag literally for decades—I'd first read “Notes on Camp” as an exceedingly arch nine-year-old—I felt as if Pallas Athena herself had suddenly materialized and offered me a cup of ambrosia. (O great Susan! Most august Goddess of Female Intellect!) I zoomed around, showing the note to various pals. To this day, when I replay it in my mind, I still get a weird toxic jolt of adolescent joy, like taking a big hit of Krazy Glue vapors out of a paper bag.

Things proceeded swiftly in our honeymoon phase. Sontag, it turned out, was coming to Stanford for a writer-in-residence stint that spring and the first morning after her arrival abruptly summoned me to take her out to breakfast. The alacrity with which I drove the forty miles down from San Francisco—trying not to get flustered but panting a bit at the wheel nonetheless—set the pattern of our days. We made the first of several madcap car trips around Palo Alto and the Stanford foothills. While I drove, often somewhat erratically, she would alternate between loud complaints about her faculty club accommodation, the bad food at the Humanities Center, the “dreariness” of my Stanford colleagues (
Terry, don't you loathe academics as much as I do? How can you abide it?
)—and her Considered Views on
Everything (
Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right—they are the greatest of musical masterpieces
). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth.
Schwärmerei
time for T-Ball.

The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on, in fact, inspired the great comic episode in this brief golden period. We were walking down University Avenue, Palo Alto's twee, boutique-crammed main drag, on our way to a bookshop. Sontag was wearing her trademark intellectual-diva outfit: voluminous black top and black silky slacks, accessorized with a number of exotic, billowy scarves. These she constantly adjusted or flung back imperiously over one shoulder, stopping now and then to puff on a cigarette or expel a series of phlegmy coughs. (The famous Sontag “look” always put me in mind of the stage direction in
Blithe Spirit
: “Enter Madame Arcati, wearing barbaric jewellery.”) Somewhat incongruously, she had completed her ensemble with a pair of pristine, startlingly white tennis shoes. These made her feet seem comically huge, like Bugs Bunny's. I half-expected her to bounce several feet up and down in the air whenever she took a step, like one of those people who have shoes made of Flubber in the old Fred McMurray movie.

She'd been telling me about the siege and how a Yugoslav woman she had taken shelter with had asked her for her autograph, even as bombs fell around them. She relished the woman's obvious intelligence (
Of course, Terry, she'd read
The Volcano Lover,
and like all Europeans, admired it tremendously
) and her own sangfroid. Then she stopped abruptly and asked, grim-faced, if I'd ever had to evade sniper fire. I said, no, unfortunately not. Lickety-split she was off, dashing in a feverish crouch from one boutique doorway to the next, white tennis shoes a blur, all the way down the street to Restoration Hardware and the Baskin-Robbins store. Five or six perplexed Palo Altans stopped to watch as she bobbed zanily in and out, ducking her head, pointing at imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at me to
follow. No one, clearly, knew who she was, though several of them looked as if they thought they should know who she was.

In those early days, I felt like an intellectual autodidact facing the greatest challenge of her career: the Autodidact of all Autodidacts. The quizzing was relentless. Had I read Robert Walser? (
Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I'm ashamed to say
…) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (
Yes! Yes, I have!
Wittgenstein's Nephew!
Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! dodged the bullet that time!
) It seemed, for a while at least, that I had yet to be contaminated by the shocking intellectual mediocrity surrounding me at Stanford U. This exemption from idiocy was due mainly, I think, to the fact that I could hold my own with her in the music-appreciation department. Trading CDs and recommendations—in a peculiar, masculine, train-spotting fashion—later became a part of our fragile bond. I scored a coup one time with some obscure Busoni arrangements she'd not heard of (though she assured me that
she had, of course, known the pianist
—the late Paul Jacobs—
very well
); but I almost came a cropper when I confessed I had never listened to Janáček's
The Excursions of Mr. Brouček
. She gave me a surprised look, then explained, somewhat loftily, that I owed it to myself, as a “cultivated person,” to become acquainted with it. (
I adore Janáček's sound world,
she opined.) A recording of the opera appeared soon after in the mail, so I knew I'd been forgiven, but after listening to it once I couldn't really get anywhere with it. (It
does
tend to go on a bit, in the same somewhat exhausting Central European way I now associate with Sontag herself.) The discs are still on my shelf. Given their exalted provenance I can't bear to unload them at the used CD shop in my neighborhood.

And she also flirted, in a coquettish, discombobulating, yet unmistakable fashion. She told me she had read my book,
The Apparitional Lesbian
, and “agreed with me entirely” about Henry James and
The Bostonians
. She made me describe at length how I'd met my then girlfriend. (
She wrote you a letter! And you answered? Terry,
I'm amazed! I get those letters all the time, but I would never answer one! Of course, Terry, I'm stunned!
) Though I was far too cowed to ask her directly about her own love life, she would reveal the occasional tidbit from her legendary past, then give me a playful, almost girlish look. (
Of course, Terry, everyone said Jeanne Moreau and I were lovers, but you know, we were just good friends.
) My apotheosis as tease target came the night of her big speech in Kresge Auditorium. She had begun by reprimanding those in the audience who failed to consider her one of the “essential” modern novelists, then read a seemingly interminable section of what was to become
In America
. (Has any other major literary figure written such an excruciatingly turgid book?) At the end, as the audience gave way to enormous, relieved clapping—thank God that's over—she made a beeline towards me. Sideswiping the smiling president of Stanford and an eager throng of autograph-seekers, she elbowed her way towards me, enveloped me rakishly in her arms and said very loudly, “Terry, we've got to stop meeting like this.” She seemed to think the line hilarious and chortled heartily. I felt at once exalted, dopey, and mortified, like a plump teenage boy getting a hard-on in front of everybody.

Though otherwise respectful, Allan Gurganus (in the
Advocate
obit) takes Sontag to task for never having come out publicly as a lesbian: “My only wish about Sontag is that she had bothered to weather what the rest of us daily endure. The disparity between her professed fearlessness and her actual self-protective closetedness strikes a questioning footnote that is the one blot on her otherwise brilliant career.”

I have to say I could never figure her out on this touchy subject, though we did talk about it. Her usual line (indignant and aggrieved) was that she didn't believe in “labels” and that if anything she was bisexual. She raged about a married couple who were following her from city to city and would subsequently publish a tell-all biography of her in 2000. Horrifyingly enough, she'd learned, the despicable
pair were planning to include photographs of her with various celebrated female companions. Obviously, both needed to be consigned to Dante's Inferno, to roast in the flames in perpetuity with the Unbaptized Babies, Usurers, and Makers of False Oaths. I struggled to keep a poker face during these rants, but couldn't help thinking that Dante should have devised a whole circle specifically for such malefactors: the Outers of Sontag.

At other times she was less vehement, and would assume a dreamy, George-Sand-in-the-1840s look.
I've loved men, Terry; I've loved women…
she would begin, with a deep sigh. What did the sex of the person matter, after all? Think of Sand herself with Chopin and Marie Dorval. Or Tsvetaeva, perhaps, with Mandelstam and Sophia Parnok. In Paris, all the elegant married ladies had mistresses. And yet in some way I felt the subject of female homosexuality—and whether she owed the world a statement on it—was an unresolved one for her. Later in our friendship, the topic seemed to become an awkward obsession, especially as I came closer to finishing up an anthology of lesbian-themed literature I'd been working on for several years. She frequently suggested things she thought I should include: most interestingly, perhaps, her favorite steamy love scene from Patricia Highsmith's 1952 lesbian romance novel
The Price of Salt
. As far as Sontag was concerned, Highsmith's dykey little potboiler—published originally under a pseudonym—was right up there with
Buddenbrooks
and
The Man Without Qualities
. Something in the story about a gifted (yet insecure) young woman who moves to Manhattan in the early 1950s to become a theater designer and ends up falling rapturously in love with a glamorous, outré older woman must have once struck a chord; Sontag seemed to dote on it.