Solitude is a problem for writers generally, who spend so much time alone rehearsing a form of ideal communication. And men —as a practical matter — are often worse at being alone than women. But for male writers, however often an appearance of self-sufficiency can be stripped away to reveal a hidden structure of support, there is a writerly tradition of solitude that has existed at least since Romanticism: Rousseau’s “my habits are those of solitude and not of men,” or Shelley’s “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” A man who chooses to be alone assumes the glamour of his forebears. A woman’s aloneness makes us suspicious: Even today it carries connotations of reluctance and abandonment, on the one hand, and selfishness and disobedience, on the other. Kate Bolick, writer of a much-discussed piece in The Atlantic about the “rise of single women,” became something of a spectacle for suggesting that she was happy, at 39, being unmarried and on her own. Albeit strangely titillated, many readers rallied to believe her. The rest called her deluded. Sontag disliked how much she relied on others, and deplored her neediness and attempts to please. In the journals, she repeatedly accuses herself of “feeding” on people for their talents or knowledge. She would be more herself if she could only “consume less of what others produce.” Even the conversation she loves and lives for is suspect. She wastes herself in talk; she should talk less about her ideas because this means she is less likely to write about them. It makes sense that Sontag experiences being alone as an intellectual loss when she associates aloneness so closely with genius. In an entry from 1966, when she is 33, she dismisses herself as not having a “first rate” mind, and blames her inadequacy in part on being too dependent: “My character, my sensibility, is ultimately too conventional . . . I’m not mad enough, not obsessed enough.” What advances she has made she attributes to not having to “package + dilute” her responses for another person, as she had to do with her ex-husband Philip Rieff or her former lover Irene Fornes.Her friendship with Jasper Johns, on the other hand, lets her untie the package: “He makes it feel natural + good + right to be crazy.” (...)
Being a genius may require being especially alone. But at least one reason to be famous (if not necessarily a genius) is to be alone no longer. Sontag points this out one morning in Prague, at breakfast by herself — so we have record of at least one breakfast eaten solo — and yet the main point of the entry is her surprised discovery of the pleasure she’s taking in solitude. It’s July of 1966, and she is at a hotel. She drinks her coffee, eats “two boiled eggs, Prague ham, [a] roll with honey,” and finds herself content for the first time in months. She doesn’t feel distracted or inhibited, and she doesn’t feel childish; instead she feels “tranquil, whole, ADULT.” Her novel may be stalled, her heart recently broken, but for a minute or two, sitting by herself at a table covered by a spotless tablecloth, her son asleep upstairs, she is at ease. She sounds hopeful, even pleased with herself. “I must learn to be alone—” she vows. Yet the resolution is less than persuasive, provoked, as it seems, by necessity. Eleven years later, when her relationship to a woman named Nicole has foundered, she is still telling herself the same thing: “Remember: this could be my one chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer. One can never be alone enough to write.” One function of the declaration is clear: to convince herself there can at least be a purpose to her unhappiness in love.
That she would never feel finished with her work; never satisfied; never recognized in the way she wanted, as first a novelist and second a critic; that she died believing she would recover, as her son David Rieff (the editor of the journals) has noted — all of this makes these resolutions especially poignant. Then again, most people need resolutions they can’t help but break, just to get by.
Vivian Gornick, Sontag’s fellow critic and contemporary (Gornick was born just two years later), tried to puzzle out something that seems to have confused Sontag, and is genuinely confusing: the relationship between solitude and romantic love. In Gornick’s 1978 collection, Essays on Feminism, she argues that, at least for women, solitude is necessary because marriage, its apparent opposite, usually gets in the way of thinking, growth, self-knowledge. In fact marriage, per Gornick, is the original, distorting expectation imposed on a woman’s life — distorting because it has been viewed, by both men and women, as the “pivotal experience of [a woman’s] psychic development,” her crowning achievement. Gornick outlines the consequences of the idea in one long, electrifying sentence: “It is this conviction, primarily, that reduces and ultimately destroys in women that flow of psychic energy that is fed in men from birth by the anxious knowledge given them that one is alone in this world; that one is never taken care of; that life is a naked battle between fear and desire, and that fear is kept in abeyance only through the recurrent surge of desire; that desire is whetted only if it is reinforced by the capacity to experience oneself; that the capacity to experience oneself is everything.” The promise of marriage is the promise of togetherness, support, safety, and this prevents a woman from taking responsibility for her own life — and therefore ultimately from “experiencing” herself — by removing the motivation behind all important action, which is the terror of aloneness. In Sontag’s envy of those writers who knew how to be alone runs a current of precisely this motivating terror. Her fear of being too much by herself fuels her desire to join the club.
For all of her skepticism of marriage, Gornick, who married and divorced twice, didn’t exactly give up on love. In “On the Progress of Feminism” she describes a friend — not a feminist, she is quick to point out — who wearily pronounces love dead. Maybe it is love, this friend says, that is keeping us from self-realization. The proposition appalls Gornick. “No,” she protests “hotly” —we need to learn to love anew. If we can stop being “in love with the ritual of love,” its tired conventions and seductive abstractions, maybe we can achieve a “free, full-hearted, eminently proportionate way of loving.” Women aren’t the only ones who suffer in marriage, but because marriage is so “damnably central” to us, we are always the more comprehensively wounded party. And because we have more to lose, “it is incumbent on us to understand that we participate in these marriages because we have no strong sense of self with which to demand and give substantial love, it is incumbent on us to make marriages that will not curtail the free, full functioning of that self.”
Is romantic love the enemy of a necessary aloneness? Or is it only through learning to be truly alone that we become capable of romantic love? Put differently, is independence a necessary precondition for any relationship or, instead, an end in itself? In Gornick we feel this dilemma being lived but not quite framed. It would be heartening to find, in her oeuvre, a woman who’d been able to do something like what she envisioned, a woman unscathed by her romantic past, in full possession of the answers to her questions, a mature and sober literary hero. We can find a likeness of this image in her work, but so can we find something more provisional and trapped, a person battling the same impulses and limitations her whole life, winning some, losing some, never arriving definitively. In Fierce Attachments (a memoir of her relationship with her mother that is as much a memoir of her relationship to romantic love), she describes being questioned by a friend about her stoicism in the face of long singledom — “You seem never to think about it,” he says to her, meaning men, or rather being without one — and as he speaks she has a vision: “I saw myself lying on a bed in late afternoon, a man’s face buried in my neck, his hand moving slowly up my thigh over my hip . . .” Poor Vivian, transfixed by her internal picture, is so “stunned by loss” she can’t even speak.
by Emily Cooke, The New Inquiry | Read more:
Susan Sontag, photographed by Peter Hujar
