Stephen Koch

Susan Sontag’s journals, Reborn, Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, is just out.

Susan was a close friend for forty years, and it was in Susan’s living room that I first met the photographer Peter Hujar, whose artistic estate I now manage. Among connoisseurs, Hujar’s reputation as a major artist is at last in place, but he’s still far from a household word. (He will be.) When I try to explain who Peter is, my quickest shortcut to the shock of recognition is to say, “I bet you know that famous portrait of Susan Sontag? You know…the one of her lying on a bed looking in space?”

Then they get it. “Oh…yeah. Susan Sontag lying down? Right. I have seen that. A great picture. He did that?”

Yes he did, and the picture is now in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and in the Metropolitan Museum in New York , one of Hujar’s great portraits.

You might be interested to know that the Sontag portrait came into existence at a major crossroads in three lives: Sontag’s, Hujar’s, and mine. Here’s how.

The portrait was made in 1975, and was intended from the beginning to be part of Hujar’s book, Portraits in Life and Death, the sole book he published during his lifetime. Peter had known Susan since 1963. In 1966 he’d done two quite beautiful portraits of her, but the 1975 image was made for a specific purpose, bound to the theme of his book, which is how portraiture—Hujar’s art, par excellence—is a meditation on mortality. How explicit—verbally explicit, I mean—was this theme for Peter as he worked? My guess would be quite. After all, the book’s title, (which was his), puts the idea right smack in front of us; so does the way the book mixes portraits of the leading figures of New York’s then downtown avant-garde with his series of images—literal portraits of the dead—made in the Palermo catacombs in 1963. In 1975, Sontag was just ending the torturous process of writing her book, On Photography. So the moment for a portrait was, to say the least, a ripe one for them both. Either then or very soon after, Peter asked Sontag if she would write the introduction to the book. She agreed. Then, typically, she procrastinated.

Right around the time On Photography appeared, Sontag suddenly had her first encounter with the series of cancers that, thirty years later, killed her. At the time, I was pretty close to Susan: close to the emerging diagnosis of breast cancer, to the medical crisis, to the personal tumult; all of it.

The night before she had her first exploratory surgery—which within days was followed by vastly more invasive surgery—I accompanied Sontag’s son, David Rieff, and some other friends to check her into Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. I remember helping settle her into the hospital room. She and I had been talking about the fear of death; I had mentioned to Susan how in earlier eras there had been such a thing as a guide to dying—for example, a book by the seventeenth century divine, Jeremy Taylor, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, once tremendously widely read. I know, I know: this must sound like pretty lugubrious chat to be having with someone about to have surgery. But Susan was Susan. She flinched at nothing. She talked about what was on her mind. And that night, dying was on her mind.

Sontag was scheduled for surgery very early the next morning. People came and went, but for some reason there was a period of an hour or so when I was left alone with Susan. Sitting up in the hospital bed, she suddenly said that before her surgery she had to attend to one bit of unfinished business: Peter Hujar’s introduction. She’d promised it; it was past due. She had to do it now. Right now. She asked me for some paper, and we got some wide flat something to write on in bed. While I sat paging through a book, Susan set about writing the introduction to Portraits in Life and Death. In less than an hour, she was done.

Here are some lines from what she wrote. “We no longer study the art of dying, a regular discipline and hygiene in older cultures; but all eyes, at rest, contain that knowledge. The body knows. And the camera shows, inexorably…Peter Hujar knows that portraits in life are always, also, portraits in death. I am moved by the purity and delicacy of his intentions. If a free human being can afford to think of thing less than death, then these memento mori can exercise morbidity as effectively as they evoke its sweet poetry and its panic.”

Sontag handed me the handwritten text, and asked if I would please type it up and get it to Hujar the next day. Soon the room filled up with people again. Not long after, the night nurse told us that we would all have to leave. I remember walking down the sidewalk outside Memorial Hospital with her son and a little bunch of friends, the handwritten introduction to Portraits in Life and Death in my pocket.

As we walked, we glanced back at Sontag’s room on maybe the fourth or fifth floor. She was standing up there, framed in the light, waving to us. I had never before seen her looking lonely. Not so lonely, at least. She kept waving and waving until we turned a corner and disappeared.

The next morning, I typed the text and delivered it to Peter Hujar at his loft at 12th Street and Second Avenue. At this point Peter Hujar and I were still acquaintances rather than real friends. For example, I’m pretty sure that morning was my first glimpse ever of the place where he lived. I gave him the two or three typed pages and quickly filled him in on Sontag’s condition. I don’t remember that I even stayed to hear his reaction to them.

But we were all at our crossroads. I mark that exchange as the transitional moment between merely knowing Peter Hujar and being his friend. Sontag’s surgery that morning showed that her cancer was exceptionally advanced, aggressive, and life threatening, and so she began her long, valiant, and finally losing battle for life. Peter and I, meanwhile, lived in the same neighborhood. After that, whenever we crossed paths, as we often did, we stopped to talk. Our conversations grew longer, and steadily more absorbing. Pretty soon we were having coffee. Then dinner. I cannot say precisely when we became, as it were, virtual brothers, friends for life. But I do know that during that spring of 1975, one of the great friendships of my life was in transition, and another was beginning.

And the pivot was this picture.

Talk to you next Friday. True, it will be the day after Christmas, and the most important grown up in my life and our daughter will be on the road. But there will be a posting anyway. Meanwhile, I’ve read Susan’s Reborn once, and by next week will have read it twice.

Who knows? If I have something fresh to say, I may say it.