Stand Aside, Sisyphus

Monday, Oct. 24, 1988 By RICHARD LACAYO

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As far as Sontag is concerned, her positions have been parodied. She winces at being pegged as a reckless advocate of writers at the edge of madness or extremity. Her essays, she says, give "a skewed notion of my taste" because she only discussed figures about whom she felt more needed to be said. "And the last thing in the world that I am is anti-intellectual. Even in the most high-spirited, somewhat simplifying formulations in some of those essays -- after all, I was in my 20s and full of combative spirit -- I was defending a much more serious approach." She did not declare that art has no moral purpose, she sighs. Her point was merely that art and morality are not the same thing, that their interactions are complex. As for equating high and popular culture, she explains, "I made a few jolly references to things in popular culture that I enjoyed. I said, for instance, one could enjoy both Jasper Johns and the Supremes. It isn't as if I wrote an essay on the Supremes."

Sontag recalls herself as "a psychologically abandoned child." Until she was six, she and her younger sister were raised mostly by aunts, in the New York area. Her parents, Polish Jews who came to the U.S. while young, spent most of their time in China, where her father was a fur trader. After his death there from tuberculosis, her mother returned to the U.S. and remarried. (Sontag uses her stepfather's last name.) In time, the new family ended up living in Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, though it would be truer to say that Sontag lived in books. The most ardent reader at North Hollywood High School, alma mater of Alan Ladd and Farley Granger, she graduated at 15 and made for the University of Chicago. (She would later do graduate work at Harvard and Oxford.) At 17 she married sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, just ten days after she met him. The marriage, which lasted seven years, was her first and last. It produced a son, David, now 36, an editor and writer in Manhattan and another of his mother's consuming passions.

The paradox of Sontag is that she is an ardent modernist with the earnestness -- and superabundant energy -- of a Victorian moralist. If she likes to "go faster," it's partly because she has so much to cram in. In August, for instance, she attended the biennial gathering of the writers group PEN International (she is president of PEN's American chapter) in Seoul and managed to infuriate Korean authorities by insistently raising the issue of imprisoned South Korean writers. Late September brought the New York Film Festival premiere of Sarah, a documentary on Sarah Bernhardt that Sontag narrates, and a week of public readings, including a benefit for writers and editors with AIDS.