Riley Moore | Editor-in-Chief

Jerome Boyd Maunsell is a writer, critic, biographer, and lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Roehampton, London. He has published two books: Portraits from Life: Modernist Novelists and Autobiography, a series of biographical case studies on Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and others; and Susan Sontag, a biography. Maunsell is a former Books Editor of Frieze, and has contributed to numerous publications, including the Evening Standard, Financial Times, Guardian, Literary Review, and The Times Literary Supplement.

A posthumous collection of feminist essays by Susan Sontag, On Women, published in May 2023. Maunsell kindly agreed to be interviewed by Riley Moore in June 2023.

Riley Moore: Let’s establish Sontag’s cultural significance: she viewed herself primarily as a novelist, but she was really engrossed by art with a capital A: film, dancing, painting, writing, photography. The best way to tackle all these subjects was to become an essayist. And so that’s what she became. 

Jerome Boyd Maunsell: It’s fair to say that Sontag’s most valued as an essayist, and it’s her essays that drew me to her work. And within those essays, as you say, she covers a range of topics. But I think there was always some tension in her own life about being an essayist. She never defined herself as such. The essays, for Sontag, were small projects that she flung out when she was between more important ones. So there’s irony in the way that the essays proved more successful than the other things she cared more about. One of the delights of reading her essays, though, is the way she acts as a conduit, or a gateway, to a variety of cultural forms and traditions. It’s often forgotten that she was essentially an enthusiast in her essays: she mostly wrote about things she admired. She was restless and voracious, too, in finding new things to write about, and she had her finger on the pulse, continually. And she wrote about these things in an incredibly stylish and allusive way. She has this style in the essays where every sentence is nearly an aphorism. Some of her essays are just aphorism after aphorism, and it’s difficult to locate her argument because she’s not arguing in a conventional way. Often, her essays present a compilation of generalised statements at the highest pitch. They are a breathtaking tour de force, opening up new, and neglected, vistas, and really challenging the reader at every step.

RM: She became famous from her 1964 essay ‘Notes on Camp.’ What’s so fame-inducing about it? 

JBM: She touched a nerve with ‘Notes on Camp’, which even today feels like a very bold experiment in essayistic form, in the way it’s set out as a series of numbered jottings and quotations. Camp, as Sontag defines it, is a type of sensibility. It’s theatrical, aestheticized, exaggerated. Part of the appeal to Sontag’s essay is that camp is so difficult to define and pinpoint; and her whole approach to the subject is a kind of tease. Camp flips hierarchies, really: on one level, camp taste is reflected in the statement ‘it’s so bad that it’s good’—but it’s more than that, too. So-called ‘serious’ taste is also dethroned and parodied by camp, which, as Sontag’s endless allusions (and epigrams from Oscar Wilde) hinted, was strongly rooted in gay experience and art. The essay was originally written for Partisan Review, the home of the New York intellectuals. But the style and the content of the essay were hugely provocative. She draws on her information for the essay, really, from her diaries, where she’d been documenting her observations of gay subcultures for a long time, and in a rather artful and knowing way in ‘Notes on Camp,’ she draws on all her knowledge and puts it in the intellectual Partisan Review. Some people were threatened by the way she opened the gates between high and low, gay and heterosexual culture. The ease with which she did that now seems prescient. But at the time it was really a radical thing. 

RM: Then comes her first book of essays Against Interpretation, published in 1966, where, in essence, she takes an anti-academic approach to literature and art. She wants us to quit the interpretation business. Why?

JBM: The title itself is a deliberate provocation. If you read all of the essays in Against Interpretation, you’ll notice they’re not interpretation-free. But I think you’re right that she was anti-academic, though she found an essayistic tone that was very close to being academic. One answer to your question is the personal answer: it’s her first book of essays, and she had spent most of the fifties setting out to become an academic herself, pursuing graduate studies at Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne. She went on to teach at Sarah Lawrence College and she had married an academic. And during the fifties she was—though there’s much debate around this—writing her husband’s book for him. The book was about Freud and Freudian interpretation. So the title of her first book of essays is an announcement that she’s not doing interpretation anymore. It’s a reaction to the over interpretation that Freud’s work had on the culture. And it’s a really clever title and it gives what is actually a really loose collection of disparate essays on a number of different genres an illusory coherence. What Sontag wanted was a more sensory approach to aesthetics—a refocusing of attention on form and style, rather than on always digging beneath the artistic surface for ‘meaning’. She urges us “to see more, to hear more, to feel more” in our responses to art, and laments the way interpretation sets up a shadow world of endless parallel meanings—“the revenge of the intellect upon art”. She wants a different kind of criticism, more freely open to what a work of art actually is.

RM: So she reached literary fame in her early thirties. But by then she had already done quite a bit of living. Her father dies when she’s five. At seventeen, she marries her professor from the University of Chicago, Philip Rieff. At nineteen, she gave birth to her son, David. Why did she marry young? 

JBM: I don’t know if she herself would be able to answer that question. She plunged into the marriage and it took a long time for her to come to terms with why she did. Throughout her teens, as she documents in her diaries, she writes about her attraction to women and her relationships with women. And then suddenly she gets married to a man and the diaries fall completely silent for a few years. But there were practical reasons for her marriage. She wanted to get far away from her childhood. She describes it as a ‘prison sentence.’ Her father dies young, and she has a tormented relationship with her mother. That’s not to say she didn’t love Philip or want to marry him. I also think she was attracted by the opportunity of doing some research work for Rieff, as she writes in her diary. She lives with Philip throughout the fifties, has David, and gradually the pressure on the marriage builds—it’s when she goes to Oxford on a fellowship in 1957 that she really makes the break with Philip, but she doesn’t tell Philip it’s over until she returns to America in 1958.

RM: One of the primary subjects in her posthumous collection, On Women, is the role delegated to women in marriage and family life more generally. She believes wives are oppressed, not just by their husbands, but by the market and the culture. Did Sontag’s experience in marriage inform her view, or was she more informed by her ability to assume the position of the ‘Other’ as she’d call it? 

JBM: Her own experience must’ve informed her view, but she doesn’t say this explicitly in On Women. She almost never wrote in an autobiographical form in her essays, but there is an interesting page or two in On Women where she does refer to her own experience. What’s notable about that, though, is that she presents her own experience, to some extent, as unusual and not really representative of the generally oppressed state of women. She mentions her divorce and the fact that she didn’t take alimony, but without dwelling on the way that she really fought for—and paid for—her freedom from the marriage. Her marriage in the fifties was unequal in many ways—she was much younger than Philip, and his work took precedence, to an almost absurd degree in her work on his book. During the fifties, she wrote a series of diary entries called ‘Notes on Marriage.’ These entries could be read as a draft of the ideas expressed in On Women, and it’s clear that her dissatisfaction is deeper than just having to play a subservient role. She became, essentially, bored. She saw through Philip, too. Later, she develops this view of relationships as a kind of give and take, but with one party usually dominant and the other submissive. This observation holds true for her fiction, too: her films Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl both feature relationships where one party is clearly dominant and the other submissive. In On Women, she thoroughly unpacks the way in which society constructs women’s roles—and it’s clear in her analysis that women have long been oppressed, in large and small ways. She focuses on ageing, and on beauty, and on the family, and tries to redefine notions about all of these things that she thought were in place in society. She wants a less narrow, much fuller role for women, stripped of imprisoning myths.

RM: You note in your biography that Sontag was a ‘non-joiner’ and preferred ‘to be seen as a writer, not a gay activist, a feminist, a postmodernist or suchlike.’ Did Sontag believe there was a clash between being a ‘writer’ and these other identities? 

JBM: She struggled to attach herself to labels for long, she always wants to break out of them. People who are deeply involved in these movements might feel slighted by the way that Sontag eats up a particular set of issues and then quickly moves onto something else. Her approach to literary genres and categories is somewhat similar, however. Part of the attraction of her essays is the way she disregards disciplinary boundaries, and flits about. I think a key thing about Sontag is that she always wanted more. Always, more.

RM: Let’s linger on Sontag’s feminism or lack thereof. In her 1975 essay ‘The Third World of Women,’ she explicitly states ‘I have always been a feminist.’ Do you think her relationship to feminism is similar to her relationship to other topics (photography, film, literature)? Is it just another topic for her to squeeze the facts out of and then display them in an essay?

JBM: No, I don’t think it is. Her concentration on what it’s like to be a woman is a central thread in much of what she produced. Even as a filmmaker, she notes that it was a very male dominated world. Her two films, Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl, can be seen as feminist works; she shows the role of women in the fifties and sixties very clearly, and the way that oppression played out in domestic relationships. In On Women, she tries to unpack feminism from politics; her point is that sexism is so prevalent that it’s much larger than politics. She wishes to view it in an international context, not simply just in industrialised America. But nonetheless she’s hesitant to attach herself to the trademarked feminist movement. 

RM: Sontag is quite adept at pinpointing societal problems—the ubiquity of sexual inequality and stereotypes, for instance—but she’s not as proficient at offering solutions. She normally becomes satirical: in response to being whistled at in the street, Sontag suggests that women should whistle back; she says women should ‘convert in sizable numbers to militant lesbianism’ and ‘establish makeup withdrawal centres,’ and ‘organise beauty contests for men.’ What do you make of her irony—is she being cynical and unhelpful? Is she merely highlighting the unseriousness of certain behaviours exhibited by men?

JBM: There is a lot of provocation, certainly. But this was written when Sontag was invested in very radical ideas: she wanted a root and branch change in our approach to the rights of women. She doesn’t want people, for instance, to make concessions about equal pay for women. It’s not enough. Therefore you shouldn’t even concede it because it’s just going to make the existing situation appear more tolerable. She wants to go back to the drawing board and start again. You can see how, in this context, people misread Sontag’s view on feminism. To Sontag, feminism wasn’t quite doing as much as she wanted. One wonders if she’s just being provocative, but I imagine she’s being more serious than you might think. One genuinely important thing we can take away from On Women is her point about androgyny: she sees the future as increasingly androgynous. She wants to break down polarities between the sexes. This could be one way of levelling inequalities.

RM: It’s worth noting that the essays collected in On Women were written in the 1970s (stretching from ’72 to ’75), and therefore some of Sontag’s critiques are dated. Men no longer condescendingly light a woman’s cigarette, for instance. This is a problem unique for essayists: essays do not endure the way fiction does. Essays generally focus on contemporary events, and when those events become dated so, too, does the essay. They become historical furniture—a sort of ‘this is what people once believed…’ Are the subjects in On Women still relevant subjects? 

JBM: Reading the book, one sees how far society has come, and how far it hasn’t come. There are many points that are still relevant: she touches on identity politics and the relationships between the sexes. She homes in on the family particularly well. With that, however, I don’t think it’s a completely successful volume. It’s unusual that Sontag doesn’t refer to other cultural reference points: she’s not, as you would expect of her, referring to films or texts in the first few pieces. But to come to your point about essays versus fiction: the more an essay makes a rigid argument, I sometimes think, the more likely it is that it won’t endure. One becomes distracted by whether it was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, and as time moves on many positions become outmoded. But essays are a varied genre—as we see today with the plethora of personal essays being published—and many of them are aesthetic experiences in their own right. Fiction can feel dated, too. As I read through fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, there’s plenty of stereotypical judgements and prejudices that make up the subtext. And sometimes novelists get carried away by trying to make a ‘point’, which often doesn’t wear well. But the novel is perhaps more self-contained and cut off from reality and built better to last in that way. Sontag’s essays can, because they are often tied to contemporary events or artefacts, feel dated, but Sontag’s essayistic style hasn’t dated whatsoever.  

RM: You note in your biography that Sontag was continually in transit, and that, in her youth, reading had been a form of travelling for her. This explains her dislike of the chroniclers of American life: Roth, Bellow, Updike. You said that Sontag had never been able to ’reconcile herself to America.’ Why is that?

JBM: The details of American life for her provoke a kind of self-loathing. She clearly has problems with certain aspects of being American: she went to Vietnam during the war, for instance, and she became profoundly aware of the political implications of being American. She seemed to feel out of place in America, at a very deep level, and in her own self-projections she is often striving to be somewhere else. She spent so much time in Europe—and she seems completely at home with European filmic and novelistic traditions.

RM: Did Sontag spread herself too thin? She was a novelist, essayist, playwright, and film-maker. Ought she have picked an artistic lane and tried to dominate it? In later life she regretted not dedicating more time to novel writing. 

JBM: What’s interesting about Sontag is that she leaps across genres, so I find it hard to regret that she didn’t spend more time on one aspect. Her inability to stay in one lane was intrinsic to who she was. And it’s really telling that, as an essayist, she saw her own essays as a bad habit that she would give up at some stage to pursue something more worthy. Her essays wouldn’t be the same if she hadn’t tried being a practitioner in other genres. And she did achieve significance in each of those genres. We should celebrate her attempt to jump across categories. Go back to her first novel, The Benefactor. The narrator is a dreamer. And that’s how Sontag views life as an artist: an attempt to do impossible things in succession and to live as if in a play. The artist is a professional dreamer, really. And that’s what she was. 

On Women is now available in paperback (May 2024).