The New Yorker & Me: Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Galchen, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, December 20, 2021

Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction?

Portrait of Thomas Mann by Elliott Erwitt, from Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections”

Erin Overbey’s “Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections” (newyorker.com, December 19, 2021) is a delightful collection of New Yorker personal essays. It includes one of my favorite Susan Sontag pieces – “Pilgrimage” (December 21, 1987), an account of Sontag’s visit with Thomas Mann in 1947. But I have a question. Is this piece fact, fiction, or faction? It originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction. It’s included in Sontag’s posthumous collection, Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.” Now, in Overbey’s collection, “Pilgrimage” is presented as “personal reflection.”

Which is it? Does it matter? To me, it matters immensely. Unlike some readers (e.g., James Wood), I’m not comfortable with essays in which there’s a “sly and knowing movement between reality and fiction” (Wood’s “Reality Effects,” The New Yorker, December 19 & 26, 2011). Did Sontag’s friend Merrill really phone Mann’s home in Pacific Palisades and receive an invitation to join him for tea? Did Sontag and Merrill actually go to Mann’s house and have tea and cake with him? Did Mann really talk to them about Wagner, Goethe, and “the value of literature” and “the necessity of protecting civilization against the forces of barbarity”? Did Mann say and do all the things that Sontag says he did? Or is the piece, in whole or in part, fabricated? For me, “Pilgrimage” gains immeasurably when it’s presented as a “personal reflection.” I hope Overbey is right.