Filmmaker Nancy Kates, whose film, Regarding Susan Sontag, had its Philadelphia premier at Philadelphia’s Jewish Museum a few years ago, said she met Sontag as an undergrad at a Meet Susan Sontag Night on the campus of the University of Chicago. 

Kates, who had been struggling with a paper on Jackson Pollack, found the answers she was looking for in Sontag’s essays in Against Interpretation, but when she went to tell Sontag about her discovery she says the diva looked at her “with utter disdain,” as if she were thinking, “I have better things to work on than helping a hapless undergrad.”

I first heard Sontag lecture in the late Sixties when I was a teenage journalism school student at Philadelphia’s Charles Morris Price School. At that time I convinced a classmate — we were editors of the school magazine — to accompany me to the Central Library on the Parkway to hear her speak. 

Sontag’s Against Interpretation has just been published which included the famous “camp” essay. The Vietnam War, then in full swing, was also beginning to season Sontag’s political and antiwar views. She was, as they say, hot property.

Dubbed “The Dark Lady of American Letters” because of her good looks and reputation as a brainy wunderkind — “the Natalie Wood of the U.S. Avant-garde” as Contemporary Biography declared — many saw her as the successor to novelist/essayist Mary McCarthy. “Dark Lady’ or not, at the Free Library podium she certainly presented an artful persona. Walking onstage in an opera cape accompanied by her son, David Rieff — then a teenager who wore his hair very long like his mother — once at the podium Sontag began flipping her great mane off her forehead while taking periodic tokes from a long cigarette holder. Those personal touches suggested Oscar Wilde and the poetry of Baudelaire.

Romantic literary glamor had finally come to Philadelphia. From the very beginning, I was hooked. 

After the library lecture I made it a point to follow Sontag’s career. Her two first novels, “The Benefactor,” and “Death Kit,” were not successful or even good according to most critics, although towards the end of her life she did publish two critically acclaimed novels, “The Volcano Lover,” and “In America.” Sontag won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2000 for “In America,” a significant achievement for a writer of mostly non-fiction (essays). Critical appreciation for her fiction seemed to vindicate her wish to be known as an “imaginative dreamer.” Yet despite her late reentry into the world of novel writing, most readers believed Sontag was first and foremost an essayist.  

Kates described Sontag as “condescending, imperialistic and difficult,” and doubted whether she would even approve of her film. Sontag, in fact, had gone to extreme lengths to stop publication of a 2000 unauthorized biography, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock. (The book was published and became a notable bestseller). More than one person asked Kates if she had taken on the project out of a spirit of revenge. Kates admits the question shocked her.  “I’d have to be pretty screwed up to want revenge for something that happened 20 or 25 years ago,” she said. 

Kates asked how I met Sontag.

Sometime in the 1980s, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a short piece announcing Sontag was teaching a graduate seminar at Temple University. I phoned Temple and left a message for her.  

I described how I had heard her speak as a journalism school student and I was interested in interviewing her for the Welcomat while she was in Philadelphia. That very afternoon she called back — “Hello, this is Susan Sontag,” she said, as I quickly drew my living room curtains shut so my mind would focus. Luckily, I already had a few preliminary questions scribbled on a notepad in case she should call and ask me questions. I knew every word I uttered would filter through the Sontag Analysis Intelligence Machine, and then would come a verdict: would Sontag’s “feel” for me warrant a “yes” or a “no?”

 I suggested an interview on her essays and some metaphysical topics. I felt comfortable using the word metaphysical because I knew Sontag had studied Comparative Religion. 

Not only was she unusually friendly, but she agreed to get in touch when she could schedule a meeting. Did this mean lunch at La Terrasse, Lickety Split or Café Nola? 

Some weeks passed and I heard nothing. But then in the mail, a letter (dated May 4, 1986) arrived from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It was from Susan.

“Forgive me for not answering your letter sooner. The time I have in Philadelphia was very compressed and every minute of it each week was accounted for, so in the end I could not find time to do the interview you requested.”  She closed with, “I wish you every success with your writing,”

In the years that followed I made it a point to go up to her every time she appeared in Philadelphia. Whether at UPenn (where I took one of her theater seminars), or Central on the Parkway, or at her big Marianne More talk at Friends Select School sponsored by the Rosenbach Museum and Library, I always scouted her out and started a conversation. 

Sontag could be incredibly warm or very hostile and dismissive. Like Kates’s Sontag snub in Chicago, I was snubbed at Central after Sontag gave a talk on staging Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Bosnia. 

I’d gone up to her during the reception and asked if she remembered a Harvard professor acquaintance of hers who had once given her a lift in his convertible MG from Provincetown to Boston at the end of the summer of 1969.

Jon Perry — the Harvard professor in question — and I had met in Boston when I was there doing alternative service as a conscientious objector. Jon told me about giving Susan a lift from Provincetown and said she was really a “pushy dyke.” I recoiled at Jon’s description because it seemed to reduce the author to a gross stereotype, although it was fashionable in Boston in those days, if you were gay, to refer to yourself as a “fag” or a “dyke.” 

“You’re a gay man and you’re calling her a dyke,” I said in shock. I was barely nineteen years old. 

Retelling the Provincetown story at Central I could see something shift in Sontag’s eyes; her pupils registered something dark. No doubt that “register” had something to do with the second part of the story that had Susan insisting that Jon up a hitchhiker — a young man with a knapsack — who, as Jon said, got in the car and rode with them to Boston and who later disembarked with Susan at a hotel on Copley Square. 

“My God,” Susan said, squaring her eyes with mine, “That was a long time ago.” I should have fled when I noticed the corners of her mouth turn down, but I stayed put until she shut me down by turning her back to me and giving her full attention to a young woman from Bosnia sitting next to her. 

Kates seemed interested in my Provincetown story because in the film she refrains from labeling Susan Sontag a lesbian or even bisexual.

“I decided not to over-specify her sexuality,” she said. “We figured, if you know she was married to her husband, Philip Rieff and that she was involved with Jasper Johns, you also knew that she fell in love with men and she fell in love with women. We didn’t have to completely spell it out for people.”  

Philip Rieff, after Susan told him she wanted a divorce, lived in Center City and was once a member of the Franklin Inn Club on Camac Street 

I had two more meetings with Sontag before her death in 2004.  The first was the Rosenbach Museum event where she spoke on photography and the poetry of Marianne Moore. Once again we had an opportunity to chat after the lecture, albeit on the run, as she was headed out to dinner with the Rosenbach brass.

Our little group began talking about Philadelphia. 

“Philadelphia is so weird,” she said, laughing. “What other American city would put a clothespin in the middle of downtown.”  

I recall saying to myself: Did she use the word “weird?” Is this the same woman who praised the novels of William S. Burroughs and who found much to like in the anti-novels of the French avant garde? 

The final encounter was a year before her death. Susan was the scheduled speaker at a Kelly Writers House two-day symposium. I attended the second day to hear her read from her work and participate in a Q and A. Arriving late for the pre-lecture breakfast, I joined the crowd around the buffet table and collided with a woman in a dark sweater who was going for the same cream cheese dip I was aiming for. We literally bumped behinds. 

I was shocked when I discovered the woman was none other than Susan Sontag.

“Oh…hello there,” she said, recognizing me before being ushered away by Kelly Writers House brass for the start of the lecture. 

During the recorded Q and A, I asked her how she weathered the storm caused by her essay on Sept. 11 in The New Yorker. 

The essay was written in fifteen minutes, she said, and she didn’t think it controversial at all when she sent it off. After the essay’s publication, the vehemence with which she was attacked was unlike anything she’d experienced to date. Even her anti-Vietnam War stance did not attract the same kind of hatred and viciousness. 

True to form, Sontag turned a stoic’s eye to the anger and death threats.

When Sontag died of leukemia in 2004, her honors included the Jerusalem Prize (2001) and the Friedenspreis, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2003).

As a teenager, her wish was to move to New York and write for Partisan Review. As it happened, the young prodigy did all that and more. Although Sontag had a particular disdain for autobiographical writing, in the first two volumes of her diaries edited by her son, the writer David Rieff, we see the unmasked Sontag.

As a young girl Sontag was an avid reader of diaries and journals. In Reborn, the first diary, one can see the influences of the Journals of Andre Gide and Paul Goodman’s infamous diary, Five Years.

Always reserved about her sexuality, Reborn unleashed a firestorm of sexual personal discovery. Although she married one of her University of Chicago professors, Philip Rieff when she was a teenager, she had already discovered her bisexuality, a fact that she would hide, although not deny, for decades to come. In the diary she writes at length of her experiences in San Francisco gay bars in the late 1940s. She also dwells on her marriage to Rieff. 

“Whoever invented marriage was an ingenious tormentor,” she wrote in 1956. “It is an institution committed to the dulling of the feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies.”

The diary is proof, as if we needed any, that Sontag was no ordinary teenager. While kids her own age were reading comic books and necking in cars, she’s reading Kant, Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, as well as trying to figure out the nature of existence. 

Hungry to learn and experience everything in life, she lists books she’s read or wants to read, movies she’s seen and her ideas about life and love.

The first diary opens with her unequivocal statement that “there is no personal god or life after death,” but ten years later she confesses to toying with the idea of converting to Catholicism. 

“A religious vocation within Catholicism is still impossible for me, because the Church is so patriarchal — but the Jews are even worse in that respect,” Sontag, herself a Jew, wrote in 1957. “Where in all Jewish history is there a St. Teresa, an Edith Stein, not to speak of Mother Cabrini.” 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.