Fado, Salazar, Pessoa, and Saramago
A Report from Lisbon’s DIS/QUIET Literary Program

by Mike Schneider

Lisbon, aka Lisboa, lies at the expansive mouth of the Tagus River—one of the best big-ship harbors in the world. It has been home to a sea-faring culture since before the Middle Ages and to ship captains like Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 was the first European to complete the perilous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. His journey to India opened trade for cinnamon, ginger, and other spices such as prized tellicherry, the King of Peppers, from the Malabar Coast.

From this commercial bonanza, as we learn in school, Portugal became a world power. Its empire grew to include Brazil, from which Afro-Brazilian traditions of music developed that in the 19th century seeped back across the Atlantic to Lisbon. This musical gumbo, a byproduct of the slave trade, became known as fado. At least a couple hundred years old and often thought of as Lisbon’s traditional music, fado — the Portuguese word for “fate” — can be compared, imperfectly, to the blues. Sung by fadistas accompanied by Portuguese guitars (think 12-string mandolin) fado expresses unattained desire, deep longing, and passionate sorrow.

Not well known—according to ethnomusicologist Rui Vieira Nery, who spoke at the 2019 DIS/QUIET Literary Program—is that fado’s deep yearning for something better, something more than reality is also, inseparably, an expression of radical politics. By the late 19th century, this included Marx, anarchism, and the union movement. By that time, says Nery, Portugal’s leading historian of fado, “fado was essentially a working-class song—very politically committed. You had fados talking about Kropotkin, Bakunin, Marx—and even Lenin later on.”

Now a recognized style of world music as well as a Lisbon tourist attraction, fado arose from a subculture of poverty and violence, adds Nery, in sailors’ bars and brothels, in the back streets of Lisbon’s harbor night-life. Students and intellectuals mixed with working-class Lisbonians, men and women, leading to, for instance, a fado from 1900 that begins: "May 1st!/Forward! Forward!/O soldiers of freedom!/Forward and destroy/National borders and property."

It comes as not much of a surprise, then, that fado went into hiding, became an underground culture, when Antonio Salazar came to power. Taking control in the late 1920s—through a military coup that overthrew a shaky republic—his regime lasted until Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” of the mid-1970s. Less well known than Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, and more subtle in wielding tools of oppression, Salazar was the 20th century’s most enduring dictator.

A well educated, staunchly Catholic, fiercely anti-communist professor of economics and life-long bachelor, Salazar gets historical credit for sagaciously managing Portugal’s economy, which had been on the brink of ruin before a 1926 coup. Harry Potter fans can unknowingly be reminded of Portugal when they think about “Salazar Slytherin.” Not only the reptilian sound of the words led J. K. Rowling to this name for her ultimate antagonist; Rowling taught English as a foreign language in Portugal in the early ’90s and drew on Portugal’s fascist past in creating her fictional world.

As in Spain, where people are still learning, literally, where the bodies of Franco-ist state terrorism are buried, Portugual is still documenting repression during nearly fifty years of Salazar’s regime. How did it happen that most democratic institutions dissolved? The story unfolds in an effectively curated exhibit of photographs, audio, video and original documents at Lisbon’s Aljube Museum of Resistance and Freedom. A Moorish word meaning “waterless well,” the Aljube is a gray, four-story building behind the main cathedral in central Lisbon—almost unnoticeable except for its imposing iron-barred door. Once a Muslim prison, a jail during the Inquisition, the Aljube re-opened as a political prison in 1928. In cells barely big enough for one person, the PIDE (International and State Defense Police) held Lisbonians for interrogation.

Of the more than 3,000 people brought in over several decades, usually for short stretches of a few days that served as firm warning, some were never seen again. Usually identified by informants as “enemies of the state,” often on the basis of overheard conversation, these detainees underwent electric shocks, sleep deprivation, beatings and isolation.

Pessoa’s Disquiet

Until the last months of his life, none of this registered in the literary work of Fernando Pessoa. Still relatively obscure outside the Portuguese-speaking world, Pessoa has gained wide regard since the 1980s as one of the great writers of the 20th century. Until he died in November 1935, likely from a used-up liver, he lived in Lisbon amid the nascent Salazar regime’s increasing authoritarianism.

Pessoa’s most original work, The Book of Disquiet, is a gathering of disconnected ruminations he wrote over more than two decades and left unpublished in a steamer trunk. “This book is the autobiography of someone who never existed,” said Pessoa, writing as Vicente Guedes, one of his many “heteronyms”—fictitious personalities who spoke through him. At various times, Pessoa used more than seventy of these heteronyms in his writing, providing many of them with a distinct backstory.

You can think of them as adult imaginary friends, said Richard Zenith, a leading Pessoa translator and critic who also spoke at the 2019 DIS/QUIET program. The heteronyms, he said, are a mode of self-expression and self-expansion. “They are beings with a sort-of-life-of-their-own,” wrote Pessoa as himself, “and opinions I do not accept. While their writings are not mine, they do also happen to be mine.”

Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock comes to mind as a parallel, expressing a related sense of self-alienation. Insistently paradoxical, self-abnegating non-affirmation characterizes The Book of Disquiet: “I am the ruins of buildings that were never more than ruins that someone, in the midst of building them, grew tired of even wanting to build.” Even to regard this as an attitude seems overly affirmative. “Anything that involves action, be it war or reasoning is false, and anything that involves abdication is false too. If only I knew how not to act and how not to abdicate from action either!”

Seldom does an exclamation point exclaim with greater indifference. For a writer whose writing abjures personality, seeming almost to flee in fear of it—and in this way, ironically, attains its distinction—it’s marvelously apropos that pessoa is the Portuguese word for person. “My scorn for everything is so great that I despise myself; for since I despise other people’s suffering, I also despise my own, and thus I crush my own suffering beneath the weight of my disdain.”

Despite such grandiloquent misanthropy, something that sounds almost like civic pride, if not happiness, radiates on occasion from The Book of Disquiet—usually in passages observing the sun and sky, rain and clouds. “Nothing in the countryside or in nature can give me anything to equal the ragged majesty of the calm moonlit city seen from Graca or São Pedro de Alcântara. For me no flowers can match the endlessly varied colors of Lisbon in the sunlight.”

Frequently compared to San Francisco as a seaport city of hills, vistas, morning fog, and streetcars, Lisbon is a changeable presence in The Book of Disquiet, often vividly rendered. This becomes more apparent in the book’s second phase, begun in 1929, when Bernardo Soares, a different heteronym, still pungently embittered if more connected to worldly reality, takes over from Guedes:

The trams growl and clang around the edges of the square, like large, yellow, mobile matchboxes, into which a child has stuck a spent match at an angle to act as a mast; as they set off they emit a loud, iron-hard whistle. The pigeons wandering about around the central statue are like dark, ever-shifting crumbs at the mercy of a scattering wind.

While writing a trunk-full of pages that didn’t see print until well after his death, Pessoa made a living translating business documents. His flair with words in this professional capacity led to an interesting run-in with the puritanism of the Salazar administration. In 1927, the owner of the business Pessoa worked for acquired exclusive rights to market Coca-Cola in Portugal and asked Pessoa to come up with an advertising slogan.

The story is dramatized in a French short movie with a fado soundtrack, “How Fernando Pessoa Saved Portugal.” Long before the English-speaking world learned that “Things go better with Coke,” Pessoa arrived at Primeiro estranha-se, depois entranha-se. Literally, “First you’re estranged, then you’re entranced.” More idiomatically, “At first you don’t like it, then it possesses you”—an idea, as Lisbon’s Minister of Health noticed, that sounds like addiction. The result: Coca-Cola was banned from Portugal, which then remained until 1977—after the return of democracy—the only European country where you couldn’t enjoy “the pause that refreshes.”

A more serious intersection between Pessoa and Salazar-ist authorities occurred during the last months of his life. About politics in general, Pessoa the Lisbon citizen maintained a stance largely consistent with his Disquiet heteronyms, Guedes and Soares: indifference to worldly affairs in the manner of Oscar Wilde’s “art for art’s sake” credo. In The Book of Disquiet, politics and current events aren’t merely unmentioned, they’re scorned: “All revolutionaries are as stupid as all reformers.”

Nevertheless, friction developed between Pessoa and Salazar’s New State (Estado Novo). The sticking point was censorship. Strict laws instituted in 1926 required fado lyrics to be approved before being sung in public, reducing the social content of fado to a whimper. Likewise newspaper and magazine articles were subject to pre-screening and several Lisbon publications were shut down.

Pessoa was paying attention, and over his last few years scribbled extensive unpublished notes on Salazar as documented by University of Lisbon historian José Barreto. Though initially accepting, if never enthused, Pessoa arrived in February 1935 at a personal critical mass. Moved as much by anti-Catholicism as curtailments on free speech, the trigger was a bill in the National Assembly, promoted by the Catholic Church and Salazar, to ban Freemasonry in Portugal.

With an inflammatory article in one of Lisbon’s daily papers, Diario de Lisboa, Pessoa left no doubt of his stance not only against state-sanctioned Catholicism but also more broadly—as an unpublished note makes plain—in support of “Man’s dignity and freedom of Mind everywhere in the world.” The Salazar-promoted merger of religion with the state had brought Pessoa to the limits of his aestheticist elitism and forced a deep-seated democratic idealism into the open.

As Barreto observes, the government had been aiming to enlist Pessoa’s intellectual prestige on its side. The state ministry of propaganda (set up in September 1933, six months after Goebbels organized Germany’s Reich ministry of propaganda) had recently given him an award for his poem “Message,” which draws on the faded glory of Portuguese sea-faring and empire to limn a vision of Portugal as a world-leading nation. Probably for that reason, although without explanation, his article wasn’t censored. Titled “Secret Associations,” it ran in a special, sold-out edition of Diario de Lisboa and, at a time of rare open debate about government, had a huge impact.

“I’ve manufactured a bomb for the first time in my life,” wrote Pessoa in another unpublished note, indulging a rare tone of self-satisfaction. After the newspaper special edition appeared, a cultural weekly, O Diablo, one of few remaining public voices of democratic opposition, paid silent tribute by printing Pessoa’s photo on its front page.

In its official newspaper the government ridiculed Pessoa—even though they’d praised him a few days before. “This is what we get when we trust poets.” Articles Pessoa wrote to further explain himself were censored, and he lived the last months of his life feeling he’d been silenced. His writing from that point on became actively hostile to Salazar.

Saramago Looks Back

Forty-nine years later, in the ominous year of Orwell’s title, Pessoa came back to life. With The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago created a rich, historical tapestry of Lisbon in the 1930s, embedded in the sweep of European events, lurching toward fascism. His novel inscribes Pessoa himself, along with one of his main heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, as fictional characters.

By the time this novel was published in 1984, Portugal’s “Carnation Revolution” of the 1970s had displaced Salazar’s authoritarian regime. Looking back almost fifty years, the novel tracks European events of 1936, such as the outbreak of Spain’s civil war and Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). It is a ghost story and a tale of befuddled romance as well as historical fiction.

Fundamentally, the novel is intertextually rooted in the writing and literary status of Pessoa: The central character, a medical doctor, returns to Lisbon from many years in Brazil to visit the grave of Pessoa the fictional character. Pessoa, whose funeral occurred before Reis arrives in Lisbon (so as a presence in the novel is an unexplained lingering spirit), appears at will to converse with and sometimes annoy his friend. As readers we know, though the character Reis does not, that he’s a Pessoa invention, doomed to non-being with the author’s passing. In his visits, which occur unannounced and unpredictably, Pessoa seems to goad Reis to question his existence. As Reis (or is it Pessoa?) puts it during their first conversation, “None of us is truly alive or truly dead.”

Within this unusual narrative framework and with an ironic sensibility fitting with fado and The Book of Disquiet, Saramago builds an epic comic satire. Among his targets: middle-class mannerisms, conservative Catholicism, police-state surveillance and 20th-century European fascism. In day and night, rain and sun, Reis wanders Lisbon’s streets, its harbor and neighborhoods, which Saramago renders evocatively.

In a Kafka-esque sub-plot that drives the narrative, Reis out of nowhere receives a police writ requiring him to report for interrogation. As he arrives at police headquarters, he’s perplexed:

They send him up to the second floor, and up he goes, holding the writ like a lamp before him, without it he would not know where to put his feet. This document is a sentence that cannot be read, and he is an illiterate sent to the executioner bearing the message, Chop off my head. The illiterate may go singing, because the day has dawned in glory. Nature, too, is unable to read. When the ax separates the head from his trunk the stars will fall, too late.

His questioning proceeds with understated foreboding—a scene that extends over pages and echoes Raskolnikov’s encounter with his detective inquisitor in Crime and Punishment. As he leaves the station, Reis gains surveillance by a stooge named Victor whose presence is always signaled by the reek of his onion breath.

Saramago’s tone throughout is as if society’s drift toward fascism is a comic opera that will play out because people are occupied with their love affairs and gossip and poets with convincing themselves of the greatness of their verse. Literary critic James Wood praised the tone of Saramago’s fiction “because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant.”

Gradually, the story advances toward a stadium rally for Salazar’s New State. Reis, in a fog of disappointed romance, caught in the flow of people and events, finds himself among the stadium throng. A speaker proclaims the urgency of the need for a national militia; the crowd roars approval. All that remains is to decide shirt color. Realization sets in that black (Mussolini’s Italy), brown (Hitler’s Germany), and blue (Franco’s Spain) are taken. What’s left?

Enough. Let me not reveal too much of this fascinating novel, in which one feels connection to Latin America’s “magical realism” and the meta-fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis evokes not only a perilous period of European history that calls out for wariness in 2019 America, but also many moods of an enduringly beautiful city.

Differently from but with parallels to Pessoa in 1935, Saramago eventually pushed the limits of official tolerance. Politically far left, he leaned toward anarchism and was critical of the Catholic Church, the European Union, and the International Monetary Fund. His controversial 1991 novel, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, reinterpreted the New Testament as an indictment of God. Government disapproval of this work led him to voluntary exile in the Canary Islands for his last twenty years.

Saramago—who, like Pessoa, was not well known outside the Portuguese-speaking world—won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature, which cited him as a writer “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion and irony continually enables us once again to apprehend an elusory reality.” Saramago died in 2010, but not before prominent literary critic Harold Bloom in 2003 dubbed him “the most gifted novelist alive in the world today.”

* * * *

Notes

Sources include: Simon Broughton, “Secret history,” New StatesmanAmerica (Oct. 11, 2007); José Barreto, “Salazar and the New State in the writings of Fernando Pessoa,” Portuguese Studies 24 (2): 169 (2008); Adam Kirsch, “Fernando Pessoa’s Disappearing Act,” The New Yorker (Aug. 28, 2017); “Fado: Portuguese Soul Music,” The Forum, BBC News, World Service (May 5, 2019).

BBC fado program: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csyp4m

DIS/QUIET Literary Program: http://disquietinternational.org/.

Quotations from The Book of Disquiet are from Margaret Jull Costa’s 2017 translation.

Quotations from The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis are from José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, translated by Giovanni Pontiero (New York: Harvest, 1992).

* * * *

Mike Schneider, who won the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize in Poetry from Texas Review Press, attended the DIS/QUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, June 23 to July 5, 2019.

Click here to purchase The Book of Disquiet
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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2019/2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

Laura Eve Engel
Octopus Books ($17)

by Greg Bem

The first book of poetry by Laura Eve Engel, Things That Go, is on its surface framed around the biblical tale of Lot’s Wife, who infamously was turned into a pillar of salt as she looked back upon the city of Sodom. The story is both adapted and used as a thematic frame by Engel at various points throughout the collection, though some poems relate more directly than others to the inspiring story.

It takes the book a while to get there, but after a handful of “Lot’s Wife” poems (sharing the same title and interspersed from the beginning of the book to its end), “Lot’s Wife Speaks” brings the metaphor and framing to its greatest elevation: “what is sitting too long at a desk / in the world without moving / what is a burden // to move and keep moving // to be taken / by the blast / by a stillness // by our looking” it reads, sending the poet’s musing out to the reader as a call, a revelation, and a beautiful epiphany. The poem continues to its close with: “is it a burden, god // how / we may become changed.”

The metaphoric use of Lot’s Wife is a subtle experiment concerned with the greater meaning behind that story. Things That Go is further concerned with human movement through time and the tension we humans have when seeking to understand growth, loss, and gain. Movement, as well as the surrounding moments of rest and reflection, can best be understood through Engel’s focus on several connected images, most importantly the desert. Often the deserts of Engel’s visionary world are those within New Mexico (in the book’s “Notes” section, she admits to being inspired by Tony Hillerman’s The Spell of New Mexico and other writings about the place). In a poem arising from Engel’s attraction to the piece of landscape art “The Lightning Field,” she writes “Light makes the desert look like the known desert.” Clarification is what Engel seeks when she talks about moving from place to place, from moment to moment; it is what we do with that movement, how we know, that pushes the book and its focus on Lot’s Wife even further.

In the poem “White Sands,” she writes again of this observation and its importance: “the shifting marked in slowness / or too speedy to be looked directly at // if I were to follow the sun directly / if I were to whirl like what’s left behind.” Moments like these offer a geographical and tangible center to the motion of humanity. Engel utilizes her space and effort for the ever-present poetic “witness,” which in this case is holistic awareness over morality, judgment, and the simplistic allegory of the biblical influences.

In Things That Go, the entirety of the world is moving, and our understanding along with it is moving too—often to our surprise and overwhelmingly beyond full comprehension. At times, the moment itself is enough to think about: “it’s not a bad place to be / out of my own hands // in the dry season / or a love that knows no next move // beyond repeating dunes sections / break apart // the horizon steady” The desert, in other words, is still there, and though out of control, it provides for us, and provides us with itself.

Aside from desert poems, Things That Go features poems about buildings and the built environment, about navigating adulthood and trying to find a belief in the complexity of relationships. The subject matter is enjoyably collected and collectivist: the poet moves through the world and finds value in it. The here and there. The then and the now.

While most of the poems feel accessible in language and tone, some are more prosaic, scrawls for the notebook: “In a Museum, I Am Moved to Contemplate Pack Animals” opens “Lately I’ve been looking at things that hurt me. / Caring, as I do, not at all for art.” There is also occasional abstraction indicative of the poet’s lyrical leanings, as seen in the middle of “Burden of Belonging”: “to whom do some of us / not belong / who hurt some of us so // but here they come again / this history of men.” And then there are poems that flutter across the page with endearing catharsis. In “First Things,” one stanza reads: “on a day like today / with weather / I have you-thoughts”; moments like this charge the book with a holistic human feeling.

A dense and lengthy collection, Things That Go makes a valiant effort at a contemporary reinterpretion of Lot’s Wife, and its strands of imagery, including that robust Southwestern landscape, offer the book an impressive cohesion, providing balance and focus to an excessive range of topics. It is exciting to think about Engel’s next work, which hopefully will continue to provide the reader with exquisite opportunities for their own reflection and sense of wonder.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2019/2020 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2020

photo by Beowulf Sheehan

Interviewed by Allan Vorda

Benjamin Moser was born and raised in Houston. He graduated from Brown University and received his Ph.D. from Utrecht University. Moser’s first book was a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector titled Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press, 2012); he subsequently edited a series of translations of Lispector for New Directions, and has published translations in Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Based on his biography of Lispector, he was invited to write a biography of Susan Sontag which took seven years to complete. Sontag: Her Life and Her Work (Ecco, $39.99) is the fruit of this labor; the book is a revealing, in-depth portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most powerful intellectuals.

The following interview was conducted in October of 2019 at the ZAZA Hotel in Houston, while Moser was in town to give a talk about the book.

Allan Vorda: How is the tour going, what has been the reception of the book, and what is it like to be back home in Houston?

Benjamin Moser: The tour is great. This is the tenth city I’ve visited, and it’s always great to be back in Houston, where I grew up. I’m lucky the reviews have been good. Sontag was so polemical I thought I would get more negative reception; I’ve received some, but I thought it would be 50/50, when in fact it’s been more like 90/10. That’s a great thing for a writer, especially when you know you’re playing with fire with someone like Sontag. The opinions can be so ferocious—people hate her, people love her, people hate that you love her, etc. It was great to write about such a controversial person.

AV: You received your B.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Utrecht University. How did you wind up in the Netherlands to do your graduate work, what was your dissertation on, and why did you decide to become a biographer?

BM: Ending up in the Netherlands had nothing to do with my graduate work. I met a Dutch person when I was living in New York, and I moved to Holland because of that.

Typically, in America, you enter a graduate program and do your years of misery for a Ph.D., but I had already written Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, which became my first book. A Dutch friend of mine was writing a biography of a Dutch writer, and he was submitting it as his Ph.D. at a Dutch university to the Dutch department. He suggested I submit Why This World to the Portuguese department. Why This World was never meant to be a dissertation, but it was long enough and substantial enough to be one; I had to do some bureaucratic stuff and I had to take some classes, but basically your dissertation is your Ph.D.

AV: Why did you choose to write biographies about Lispector and Sontag?

BM: Because of my work on Why This World, I was asked by Sontag’s son, her agent, and her publisher to do her biography. I didn’t really decide to become a biographer—basically, I had written one biography I thought I was finished with biographies, but I realized I wasn’t because it’s an irresistible subject. It was a big honor to be asked to write about Sontag.

AV: Sontag moved to New York from California and began writing essays, yet at age thirty-two she ends up dining with Leonard Bernstein, Richard Avedon, William Styron, Sybil Burton, and Jacqueline Kennedy at a New York restaurant. Everyone looking at this table would have had to wonder who the hell is this beautiful, young woman? How do you explain Sontag’s fame that seemed to rise from out of nowhere?

BM: This is a hard question to answer. You think, okay, she’s good looking, she’s interesting, and she’s smart, but there are a lot of good-looking, interesting, smart writers who never end up hanging out with Jackie Kennedy. Sontag enters the world as this nerdy, grad student type. She spent several years writing a book on Freud with her husband, and then suddenly she becomes very famous. I think what put her over the boundary between well-regarded young writer and famous person was the essay “Notes on Camp,” which was published right around the time Jackie Kennedy’s husband was killed in Dallas.

“Notes on Camp” seemed to tap into something very subversive and very surprising. It basically had to do with the emergence of both women and homosexuals into a broader awareness. It was scandalous. It’s hard to imagine. So much has changed since that time. Diane Carroll just died and she was eighty-four years old—she was the first black person to ever be on television and not play a servant—so you can see how far we’ve come. To write about gay culture in public was completely shocking at that time, and it made Sontag seem dangerous, and sexy, and subversive. Suddenly, she was catapulted to this level of celebrity which she occupied for the rest of her life.

AV: You state Sontag’s “equation of sleep with death would never change” since she viewed sleeping as sloth and “tried to avoid it, and was often ashamed to reveal that she slept at all”; she became a chronic user of amphetamines in order to write longer. Sontag also stated: “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality.” Sontag had a lot of issues in her life, including a fractured relationship with her mother; a pathetic marriage; the use of drugs and alcohol; smoking two packs of cigarettes a day; lack of hygiene for days at a time; and her sexuality. Yet this was a driven woman. What do you think were the driving forces behind Sontag’s desire to write and be famous?

BM: I don’t think her drive existed despite these issues, I think the drive existed partly because of these issues. She was someone who was in flight from death in a certain way, as we all are. She was nervous about being gay, and she was always nervous that she was falling short in various ways. But I think that feeling motivated her. If she didn’t have those qualities, she wouldn’t have been the person that she became. If she had lived happily in Tucson or Los Angeles, she would not have been Susan Sontag.

AV: Philip Rieff was twenty-eight when he married the seventeen-year old Sontag after knowing her for one week. Briefly describe their marriage and the likelihood that Sontag, and not Rieff, should have been credited as the author of the book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.

BM: This was something that everybody knew, because Sontag had always said it privately. But she gave up this book because she was trying to get divorced. Rieff was threatening to her. She had a child with him, and at the time you could easily get your child taken away from you if you were gay. She wanted to be rid of Rieff, so she said just take the book, let me have my kid, leave me alone. I don’t think this is something she did immediately, but it’s something she arrived at because she was sick of the whole situation.

She regretted it for the rest of her life. She would always talk about it. I worked on the Sontag biography for seven years, and I think she worked on Freud for eight or nine years. The thought of someone taking away a piece of work after all those years is maddening. So it doesn’t surprise me that she was resentful.

AV: Since you have a Jewish background, as do your subjects Sontag and Lispector, did this prove helpful and give you a better insight into writing these biographies?

BM: On Lispector, definitely. For Sontag, not really. Sontag was an American Jew like I am—it wasn’t a big issue for her. I think you can overstate these similarities, like I’m Jewish and she’s Jewish. I’m gay and she’s gay. I’m American and she’s American. I think her Jewish background is pretty standard, and in New York it’s not a disadvantage. It might have been a disadvantage if she were like Lispector, who came from a place of deathly anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, but that wasn’t the case for Sontag.

AV: Irene Fornés, a Cuban-American playwright and director, became Sontag’s lover in 1959. Despite having been married and having a son as well as a lengthy affair with Harriet Sohmers, you state that “Irene introduced her to the orgasm” at age twenty-six. Sontag wrote: “I feel for the first time the living possibility of being a writer. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego. For me to write I must find my ego.” How important, both sexually and intellectually, was Irene Fornes in transforming Sontag’s life?

BM: It’s so funny: when I got to the UK to do some publicity, which was three weeks ago, people immediately asked me about the orgasm. Everybody was really interested in this, and I thought it was fascinating because it’s one of these things that you see has changed so much. Now there is so much more awareness of sex, but a lot of older women told me: “We really didn’t know about this, no one told us!”

There was no sex education. It was unspeakable in the media. I think what the orgasm represented for Sontag is a possibility of freedom. She’s locked into this marriage and this conservative society and all these ideas, and suddenly she has an orgasm with this incredibly sensual and sexual woman. This was really appealing to someone like Sontag, who had always been living in her own head.

Sexual liberation, if you want to put it that way, was extremely exciting, and in fact she starts writing more after that. She had already written the Freud book, but she starts writing with a lot more excitement. She starts looking for that thrill you get from certain forms of sex—and from certain forms of art.

AV: Another person who heavily affected Sontag’s life was Roger Straus, of the Farrar, Straus, Giroux publishing firm: “He published every one of her books. He kept her alive, professionally, financially, and sometimes physically.” Without Roger Straus, would Sontag have achieved the heights she reached?

BM: That’s a good question, and it’s hard to say. Straus provided unstinting support, and not a lot of writers have that. He loved her, and he saw her through some of her more reader-unfriendly phases. He would take care of her son when she was on vacation. He would pay her light bills. He protected her. She didn’t have a father; her father died in China when she was five. So Straus was a father figure, and a lot of other writers were jealous of this. That sort of relationship is rare for a writer, and she found it at a young age; I think it was incredibly helpful.

AV: You state that “hidden in ‘Notes on Camp’—not, it must be said, well hidden—is a still more aggressive contention. Camp, as Sontag posited it, was not about leveling: au contraire. It meant the establishment of a new hierarchy. The true ‘aristocrats of taste,’ she proclaimed, were homosexuals.” How important was this essay, which was a bold statement of homosexual superiority?

BM: It was extremely aggresive, in a way we can’t really imagine now. If you look at the letters to the editor, they were absolutely outraged. It’s almost hilarious to read these letters; they were saying it’s the death of America. What they meant was if gay people were allowed to exist without shame, then culture would collapse, moral value would collapse, and consequently the whole country would collapse. You can see how long and how obsessed the right wing has been with these things. Since we are both from Texas, we know the right wing is still at it.

“Notes on Camp” was very aggressive in a way I don’t think Sontag thought it would be. I think she thought it was kind of prankish. It was almost a joke to her. But as Freud tells us, jokes reveal deeper truths, and the deeper truth she revealed was that there was a whole restless movement in America. There was a desire to not conform, not just live the life that your parents live. She gave permission for that, including a sexual acceptance for people, and it was very exciting.

AV: Can you tell us a bit about Paul Thek, whom Sontag said was “the most important person in my life”?

BM: Thek was a part of the movement in her life of which Fornes which also a part. Neither was educated, while everybody Sontag knew was a super-refined Jewish intellectual. I think Fornes had a fifth-grade education, and I don’t think Paul graduated from high school. Yet they were both geniuses. They didn’t need all the books. They could just create, and they gave Sontag permission to extend her curiosity into areas that wouldn’t have been approved by academia, or by the official voices of the critical-intellectual patriarchy. She was absolutely turned on by him, including sexually. He was hot. This was something completely different from her professors at the University of Chicago.

AV: Sontag was derided for her essay “What’s Happening in America,” where she stated the “white race is the cancer of human history.” What were the short-term and long-term effects of this statement in regards to Sontag’s reputation?

BM: Long-term, zero. To my sadness and pain, I haven’t had any right-wing haters for this book. I thought more right-wingers would come out and attack Sontag, but the right wing now has no intellectual component. It did; there was a completely legitimate conservative school of thought in America. For example, the culture was against expanding the canon of great books; it was a discussion that Sontag was a part of. But now? Does Donald Trump care about Aristotle? One suspects he does not.

“The white race is the cancer of humanity” is really a statement from and about the age of Vietnam. I think it was hard for people to imagine how maddening the Vietnam War was, until Trump came along. Even if you didn’t like Obama, for example, whether from the right or the left, he seemed like a reasonable guy. And then all of the sudden the whole country gets flushed down the toilet. You see the reactions people have. I think Sontag’s real contribution comes when she gives up radicalism, with statements like these that sound so over the top, and embraces liberalism, which is about progressive, democratic change. It’s not about overthrowing the government. It’s not about tanks in the streets. It’s about what she does later in her life, like in Sarajevo.

AV: Your analogy between Trump and the Vietnam War is perfect. I grew up during the ’60s and every day you turned on the television there was horrible news, and people kept asking themselves when it was going to end. And now it’s the same with Trump; every day there is breaking news and you think when is this nightmare going to end.

BM: That analogy helps me understand Sontag. When I first started to research her, I thought it was kind of crazy of her to say things like that. But looking through that lens, I don’t think she was crazy at all. It makes perfect sense.

AV: In the ’60s, Sontag had affairs with Richard Goodwin (her first orgasm with a man), Robert Kennedy, and Warren Beatty; yet she had no real interest in these men. These affairs were merely “amusing” to her, but afterwards “it was back to the monastic cell.” Is this how Sontag spent a good portion of her life, with brief affairs with both men and women?

BM: Her affairs with women were not brief. Her affairs with men were often with men who turned her on because they were so remarkable. The men you listed were fascinating people, but the sexual aspects were often one-night stands, or maybe two weeks as was the case with Warren Beatty. Her emotional involvement was with women; there is not a word in her journals—and there are one hundred volumes of her journals—where she’s tearing her hair out about a guy. It’s all the women that she’s emotionally attracted to.

Mostly, though, I think she did spend a lot of time in the monastic cell. She wouldn’t have produced as much as she did otherwise. There was no way you could write those books if you were screwing around all day. You have to work to write all those books.

AV: Sontag’s son said, “I don’t think Susan ever loved anyone the way she loved Carlotta,” in reference to Anna Carlotta del Pezzo, Duchess of Caianello. The painter Marilu Eustachio said of her milieu that everyone did something, but Carlotta “was the only one who did absolutely nothing.” The poet Cavalli added: “I don’t think she ever read a book in her life.” And, when Eustachio reproached Carlotta for her languor, you state that Carlotta bristled: “So you think it’s easy, doing nothing?” It seems unimaginable that Sontag, a noted workaholic, could be so in love with a woman like this.

BM: It’s like a fantasy for Sontag. Carlotta was beautiful, aristocratic, and fascinating to Susan. There’s a moment in the book where someone says, she’s not the type of person who thinks, “Instead of being at this party in Capri, I should be writing a play.” And that’s exactly what Susan was like—always feeling like she should be doing something important. Of course, Carlotta’s life was not enviable; she’s what the British call a waster. Carlotta hung out and got drunk. But it was precisely this kind of indolence, taken to an extreme degree, that was attractive for someone like Sontag, who was always working so hard.

AV: Another person who affected Sontag’s life was the actress and director known as Nicole Stéphane, but whose real name was Nicole-Mathilde-Stephanie de Rothschild, a member of Europe’s greatest banking family.

BM: Nicole comes after Carlotta. She was connected with all these famous people. She was also a motherly figure for Sontag. I don’t think they were really in love with each other, sexually. But Nicole adopted Susan and took care of her and made sure she bathed and made sure she got in the taxi on time. This was at a time that Susan was really falling apart, and Nicole gave her the strength to pull herself back together.

AV: If it were not for Sontag’s son, David Rieff, needing a physical to enter Princeton, she would have never had her physical in which “a metastasized cancer, stage 4” was discovered in her left breast. This fortuitous event gave Sontag almost another thirty years.

BM: Even with the discovery, she almost died—it was stage 4, and it was forty years ago, when cancer treatment was a lot less effective than it is now. She survived by a miracle.

AV: In what ways did the poet Joseph Brodsky, with whom Sontag fell in love, change her life?

BM: He had come out of the Soviet Union, and he insisted how bad communism was, which she didn’t really understand. I think she knew it intellectually, but she didn’t know it emotionally until she met him.

And, of course, he was a great artist, and she was always extremely attracted to great artists. He bullied her, which is interesting because she was known as a bully herself. When she met some of these stronger forces, she reacted in a completely opposite way, as a lot of bullies do when they meet a stone they can’t move.

AV: You recount how in a Town Hall meeting, Sontag said, “Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.” What was behind her shift from a radical stance to a liberal one?

BM: This is what Brodsky brought about, and it was also the result of Vietnam. Living in a very small, New York, left-wing, Jewish, intellectual world, Sontag didn’t quite realize that communism wasn’t really part of the conversation in the rest of the country. I think this was the moment where she became a real liberal. She stands up for someone like Salman Rushdie, working at PEN to protest the imprisonment of writers in Korea, and starts going to Sarajevo.

I think communism is attractive as an idea because it promises a complete elimination of injustice. But that’s not what liberals believe. Liberals think maybe you can’t improve everything, but you can open a kindergarten for underprivileged children and help twenty kids get a better education. This requires a bit of humility. The world needs to be changed, and we all know it. But it’s easier said than done. So should you give up and do nothing? Or should you do your little something in your own little place?

AV: In your chapter “The Word Won’t go Away,” you discuss how Sontag, who was gay, failed to address the AIDS epidemic. Why didn’t she address the issue, and do you think she regretted her silence?

BM: That’s a really tough question because of the speed with which these things have changed. My dad grew up in Houston, and he said when he was a kid it was unthinkable that a black guy and a white guy would eat at the same table. It was just something that did not exist. Gay rights were like this in a certain way, but the change was very radical and very fast.

Sontag grew up in a world in which lesbians were considered man-killing dykes, and gay men were guys who flashed little boys on the playground. There was no gay representation, no ideas, no discussion. It was totally taboo. If you were discovered to be gay, you could lose your home, you could lose your job, and you could lose your child, which almost happened to Sontag.

She was someone who was called upon by the community to make a huge change in her life, and she wasn’t able to make the change that quickly, even though she was fifty at that time. Sontag always had relationships with women, but there was an internalized homophobia which kept her from playing a role in certain areas. This isn’t to say she didn’t play a role. The fact was she was gay and everyone knew she was gay, but she never talked about it. I can’t tell you how many lesbians have told me how inspiring she was. She embodied the idea that you could be gay and be an intellectual and write and be respected. Being gay didn’t have to mean the end of your life. This was really meaningful to a lot of people.

AV: Your comments make me think about Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, in which he discusses a poll breaking down the chances of being elected President of the United States. At the bottom of the list is being black, gay, and an atheist. Since that short time ago we have had a black President, and Pete Buttigieg is running for President. Perhaps in our lifetime we will have a President who is an atheist, and remove that last prejudicial issue.

BM: I think Americans are sick of having religion shoved down their throats. I hope it won’t even be a question in the future. No religion? Who cares? Let’s talk about healthcare.

AV: How instrumental was the great photographer, Annie Leibovitz, in helping Sontag both emotionally and financially? Their long-lasting affair was bizarre in that Sontag would often ridicule Leibowitz in public, yet Leibowitz put up with the humiliation and gave Sontag a lot of money during their relationship.

BM: This was hard for me to understand, because I heard shocking stories about their relationship, none of which were a secret—it was all in public. Susan would say terrible things to Annie. Annie, on the other hand, was not a pushover. She has now been at the top of her profession for fifty years, and was someone who was powerful in her own right. It made me wonder how she could put up with Sontag’s ridicule.

I finally talked to Annie after a couple years of trying to reach out to her. I was actually walking along the street in Paris when I got a phone call from one of her studios. Some woman said, “Annie wants to talk to you, can you come see her tomorrow?” I said, “Sure. Where?” They gave me an address in the West Village of New York. I got on a plane and I went the very next day.

I talked to Annie all day, and I really understood that despite all these negative stories, Annie is a tough cookie. She didn’t really mind as much as other people thought she did. She’s can hold her own, and she really loved Susan.

AV: Sontag was a natural beauty, but you indicate she never took care of herself, which included not brushing her teeth or taking a shower for several days. It makes me wonder why people were attracted to her, especially the physical relationships. Why did Sontag have such little regard for her own hygiene?

BM: Sontag’s sister said this was a problem even in elementary school. I think part of the attraction was it didn’t look like she was trying hard. She was just different. It’s a mystery as far as the hygiene goes, but she had star power that is hard to quantify.

AV: If Sontag didn’t address the AIDS situation properly, she definitely exceeded expectations regarding the Serbian-Bosnian conflict. Do you think this was the best moment in her life?

BM: The other night when I was in Los Angeles for a reading, there was this old guy in the audience. I was so excited because it was Merrill Rodin, who went with Sontag to see Thomas Mann in 1949. They had this game called the Stravinsky game, in which you would ask yourself how many years would you give Stravinsky in exchange for you dropping dead right here on the spot. They concluded that they’d be willing to die in order to give Stravinsky four years of life.

So she always thought culture and art were worth dying for. She thought art made human life more than the sum of pain and suffering and misery. She found a place where she could put that idea into practice. This is the story of what she did in Sarajevo by putting on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in 1993.

I can tell you all those mixed feelings people might have had about her in New York, or Paris, or wherever—none of those mixed feelings existed in Sarajevo. People loved her for what she did. They named the square in front of the national theatre for her. She found the thing she was meant to do in her life, and that was to stand for culture and art and civilization and tolerance and antiracism and antiwar.

AV: Sontag had a lot of occasions that helped her to project “her own desire to be reinvented.” In this she was a precursor to someone like Madonna. How was Sontag able to stay in the limelight for roughly fifty years? Do you think her prominence will diminish over time?

BM: It’s interesting you mention Madonna, because reinvention is often a word that comes up with her. The thing is with Sontag, when you look at her life, and her process of going from one thing to the next, it’s not a reinvention that comes about because she has a new album, which is the impression you get with Madonna. That’s not to belittle Madonna; I think she’s more interesting than that. But with Sontag she was always trying to find something to do with herself, and it often comes out of pain and longing and failure. She’s propelling herself, and finding a way to get back on her feet and do something new. I think it’s really American in a certain way, and really courageous. This is a woman who almost died of cancer twice. A woman who was always struggling, who was often unhappy, and who was nevertheless able to keep going and produce this incredible amount of work. One of my ambitions for this biography is that I want people to come back to her work. I realize this is probably romantic, but I really hope people will start reading Sontag.

AV: What plans do you have for your next book? Will it be another biography, or perhaps something else?

BM: I have no idea, but it’s not going to be another biography. I really don’t know what I’ll do, but I think about it all the time. I’m waiting for the love of my life to come along and explain it all to me. It will happen, but for right now, I just have to let Sontag flow out of my system.

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