Susan Sontag by Carl Rollyson

Author:Carl Rollyson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2016-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

17

RECOVERY

1976–77

In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez, a twenty-five-year-old writer and Columbia University MFA, went to work for Susan Sontag. During Sontag’s illness, correspondence had piled up, and she wanted an assistant who could take down dictated replies. They worked in Sontag’s austere, “blindingly bright” Riverside Drive apartment at 106th Street. In an interview, Nunez set the scene:

That part of the city was seedier and much less safe than it is today, and everyone complained about it being a wasteland. If you wanted to go to a good restaurant, you had to leave the neighborhood. There were no decent Chinese restaurants, which is why we went all the way to Chinatown. You couldn’t get a good cup of coffee or tea anywhere. The nearest gourmet market was Zabar’s, 25 blocks away. Luckily, they delivered.

Sontag’s apartment was kept intentionally devoid of decoration and clutter so as not to distract her from writing—an unsuccessful ploy most of the time, because Sontag craved company and went out almost every day to see films and attend other cultural events. Although chemotherapy had thinned her thick black hair, and her sallow complexion made her look older than her actual age (forty-three), Nunez did not at first realize that her employer was ill, let alone recovering from a cancer that was supposed to kill her. As Sontag regained her strength, her hair grew back in white-and-gray, and yet to Nunez the result made for a more youthful appearance. And Sontag’s energy remained phenomenal. She went out almost every night.

Work on the correspondence dragged on because of the constantly ringing telephone, which Sontag never tired of answering. Nunez waited, often for long periods, as her employer chatted. Sontag was aware of how the calls distracted her. “I will tell people not to call in the morning, or not answer the phone,” she noted in her diary. She loved to gossip, especially with Roger Straus, who called nearly every day. In her diary for February 20, 1977 she wrote, “I will have lunch only with Roger.”

When not involved with Straus, Sontag turned to her other cynosure, David, who lived with her. Like her mother, Sontag did not like to think of herself as a mother, but rather as David’s older sister—although almost in the same breath she would brag about what a good mother she was, much better than her own mother, the only measuring stick Sontag cared to use for her own maternity. Mildred Sontag showed up once, looking, in Nunez’s words, “like an aged flapper—like an old Louise Brooks. Red lipstick, and long read fingernails, wearing rings,” and maybe even using a cigarette holder, Nunez thought. Perhaps not, but the details fit into Nunez’s picture of Susan’s mother and also into Sontag’s own depictions of Mildred, who always thought of herself as young and not a mother at all—much like Sontag herself, although she loved to say, “I’m not like my mother.” In at least one respect this assessment was true. Mildred had not supported her

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