[KB] Burke and Sontag

[Wess, Robert Victor]

Burke appears on a few pages in Benjamin Moser's Sontag: Her Life and Work (2019), in his chapter on her time at the University of Chicago (chapter 7).

As the following sentence suggests, Moser knows little about Burke: "One of the great eminences of Chicago, Burke was hardly well known outside it" (98).

Moser relates two stories I'd heard before, but he also identifies sources for them new to me. Maybe there are other sources.

One is the story of Burke identifying himself in a class by writing "Mr. Burke" on the blackboard, then Sontag asking after class if he is "Kenneth Burke." Burke says yes and asks why she wants to know. She explains that she had read PC, PLF, and GM. Source: Leland Poague, ed. Conversations with Susan Sontag, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. p. 275. Sontag was only 16 when she started at Chicago in the 1949-50 school year. When she was 14, her high school principal told her mother that she had already read more books than her English teacher (79). Sontag placed out of most of the freshman and sophomore courses, and graduated in two years. 

The other is Burke's claim that Sontag was the best student he ever had. Source: Carl E. Rollyson and Lisa Olson Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, NY: Norton, 2000, p 32. Burke's claim appears in a letter to Hyman, 8/13/63, where Burke is evidently talking about Sontag's novel, The Benefactor, which he mentions in his article on Nightwood. Burke also writes Sontag about the novel on 7/25/63.

Moser says Burke interested Sontag particularly because of his connections to Hart Crane and Djuna Barnes. "For Susan, Burke was a direct connection to the world to which she aspired" (99). In her class with Burke, Sontag wrote a paper on Nightwood. Moser says this paper survives in the Sontag Papers, which are in Collection 612 at UCLA Library Special Collections.

Bob