A Nagging Question about Susan Sontag
In my world, or perhaps my generation, Susan Sontag was mostly famous for being famous and having a skunk streak in her hair. I'll leave serious comment on her work to those who know it better than I do. (I've only read "Notes on Camp" and some selections on Cuban posters.) As a self-employed writer, however, I was struck by this passage in the NYT's long obit:
She found the form an agony: a long essay took from nine months to a year to complete, often requiring 20 or more drafts.
"I've had thousands of pages for a 30-page essay," she said in a 1992 interview. " 'On Photography,' which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day."
How do you earn a living like that? The audience for intellectual essays is not big to begin with, and one book in five years, with no other career on the side, is hardly enough production to pay normal bills, let alone support a collection of 15,000 books and space to house them in Manhattan.
Professor Postrel, whose job conveniently provides health insurance for his self-employed spouse, suggests that the answer lies at the end of this less-than-favorable obit by Roger Kimball.
UPDATE: Christopher Hitchens, who most certainly does not take nine months to write an essay, sheds no light on the mysteries of Sontag's finances. But his appreciative obit does balance Kimball's jaundiced view.