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Tuesday, December 06, 2005
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Creepy essay about Susan Sontag… …by her son, in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine (here’s a link to Barista , which reproduced it). The piece is yet another Cheyne-Stoking memoir. This is the name UD gives the popular new essay form in which the reader is taken through every stage of another person‘s death -- including the very last seconds. John Bayley’s clinically meticulous description of Iris Murdoch’s death, and, more recently, Joan Didion’s take on John Gregory Dunne’s death (Didion is rewriting her essay as a Broadway play) are examples. There’s an undeniable fascination in being privy to details of the sudden collapse, the drawn out degradation, the desperate last days and minutes, of iconic figures of intellectual and aesthetic dignity and power. At their best, these sorts of memoirs can rivet our attention and remind us of our shared fragility, of the vulnerability even the strongest among us must endure in the face of morbid processes. But Cheyne-Stoking memoirs can turn on you. They can reveal, as David Rieff’s does, arrogance and hypocrisy even unto death. As a serious moralist and intellectual, Susan Sontag spent a good deal of time reviling American materialism. She loathed the way people in this country think everything’s about money. Yet faced with a fatal diagnosis at an advanced age, Sontag shelled out hundreds of thousands of her own dollars (no medical insurer would touch her hopeless case) on insanely expensive experimental stuff because, as her son says, she refused to reconcile herself to dying. Ever. Or, well, maybe at a hundred: She had a “single-minded focus on her own longevity and, as she got older, … frequent[ly] voic[ed] the hope of living to be 100.” She would “beat the odds.” She would “be the exception.” We are supposed to applaud her gumption here, but Sontag’s incredulous fury to the last moment of her existence at the insult of her having to die, and her unhesitating willingness to use her wealth to keep herself alive under any circumstances (those hundreds of thousands of dollars could have done a good deal for any number of causes close to her heart, rather than being spent to distort that much more an already sharply inegalitarian health care system) are not admirable but horrible. Her son does seem to understand some of this; he worries that we are “rapidly moving toward a health care system in which [as one of the doctors he talks to says] ‘only the rich will be able to choose the treatment they want.’” But this leaves open the whole question of whether what a person wants is what they should get. Because of her wealth, Sontag was able to depart this world with the same sense of entitlement and exceptionalism she apparently had all along. |