The sphinx

Yet a cultural study of intellectual celebrity with Sontag as its emblematic figure would be worth writing because the question of her fame is, I think, a legitimate one. Why has she been so famous for so many years? What does her name stand for in novels and movies and magazine cartoons? What is it about her that compels people like Rollyson and Paddock to proclaim her an icon and a phenomenon? If Sontag were a man would this extraordinary hyperbole be associated with her person or her work? Now there we have a question that answers itself.

Sontag's fame is clearly linked to the fact that she is a woman, and a beautiful one at that. To a middlebrow culture, a beautiful woman who is also an intellectual is an enduring amazement, one as alive in the 20th century as it was in the 18th when Samuel Johnson said, "It's not so much that she does it well as that she does it at all." By which I do not mean that Sontag doesn't do it well -- she does, supremely -- only that her celebrity is inextricably tied to this insufferable deeper truth. A dramatic-looking intellectual woman of her generation was destined to become a dancing dog, that is, a phenomenon, a freak, a creature adored as a magical object.

The woman writer of the previous generation who had occupied this slot -- and it is a slot -- was Mary McCarthy, the original "dark lady of American letters" (a term of description that has been applied to Sontag as well). McCarthy -- bold, beautiful, brilliant -- was, like Sontag, marked both by her brilliance and by an inexplicable sense of entitlement that compelled her to operate (from the start) with astonishing self-assurance at the typewriter and in a roomful of literary fame. It was the two together that got both McCarthy and Sontag anointed as remarkable exceptions -- women whose nerve made them worthy of inordinate recognition. For each of them this special status would prove formative.

Susan Sontag has lived most of her life as the remarkable exception. What has that meant to her? What has it taught her? What did it let her see that she would not otherwise have seen? What has she made of being an exotic, a specimen? What insight has it given her into the meaning of privilege arbitrarily extended, power arbitrarily denied? It's not too often that the remarkable exception speaks openly, with honesty and thoughtfulness. In our time, only a handful have, maybe not even that. Rebecca West, Simone de Beauvoir, who else?

De Beauvoir is an important case in point.. For more than 20 years she'd been Sartre's intellectual companion: knew everyone, went everywhere, published prodigiously, considered herself free, equal, independent and inside. Then she set out to explain Sartre's theory of existentialism, using herself to show how it worked, and discovered that she herself was "other." She was not central to the action, she was there on sufferance; she was only a woman. Out of this discovery came "The Second Sex."

I would like to see a biography of Sontag -- or a memoir, for that matter -- with her status as the remarkable exception at the vital center. I'd like to see that status organize the prose, form the perspective from which all else is interpreted. This, I think, is the true value of Sontag's life: the exemplary experience, the thing that makes writing about her of interest.

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