Où est le cinéma?

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work starts promisingly. The discussion of Sontag’s childhood and early youth in California is extremely detailed, so much so that one starts to understand why Moser needs 705 pages of text and another 111 pages of apparatus (including the index) to get the whole job done. As with Pauline Kael, it’s all too easy to ignore Sontag’s western background: the fact that she came to New York as a conscious choice and was never entirely at home in the city. This could serve as an explanation for Kael’s sustained crankiness and sometimes philistinish pose of anti-intellectualism; Sontag, on the other hand, seems to have allowed that “doesn’t quite belong to NYC” sensibility to lead her into a voracious cosmopolitanism, an altogether more agreeable result of being slightly uncomfortable in the Big Apple.

That is exactly how far I wish to walk down the is promising on this front, with Moser elaborating on, for instance, Sontag’s early trips to Paris; but even then he can’t help himself, as he relentlessly moves into psychoanalysis of the dead. Evoking the sensual and intellectual pleasures of the City of Lights, he writes that, in 1957, “Susan went to Paris to find those things, but especially to find a previous version of herself, the potentially happy woman reborn in Berkeley and then quickly shoehorned into an impossible marriage.”