[KB] More on Burke and Sontag

[Wess, Robert Victor]

In my post on Burke and Sontag, I mentioned sources new to me in Moser's recounting of the Burke stories. Regarding the story of Sontag's youthful reading of Burke, I should have also mentioned an additional source that James Beasley references on pp. 42-43 in his recent book, Rhetoric at the University of Chicago, namely,  Sontag, "A Gluttonous Reader," in An Unsentimental Education: Writers and Chicago, ed. Molly McQuade, U Chicago P, 1995, p. 164. 

Beasley also recounts Sontag's response to McKeon, something Moser ignores.

An additional note: for all her brilliance, Sontag was dumb enough to marry Philip Rieff only ten days after meeting him. He was one of her teachers at Chicago. The marriage didn't work out. Among other things, Sontag co-wrote a book with Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, but he took full credit for it and the book made his career. Decades after their divorce, he begged her forgiveness for not listing her as co-author. By that time her fame surpassed his. 

I guess there is a limit to what you can learn from books.

Bob 
________________________________________
From: KB [kb-bounces at kbjournal.org] on behalf of Jarron Slater [slate151 at umn.edu]
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2019 10:20 AM
To: kb at kbjournal.org
Subject: Re: [KB] KB Digest, Vol 58, Issue 1

Thanks for this insightful information. Is anyone working on a non-scholarly biography of Burke? It seems that there is a need for--and has been for a while--a biography about Burke introducing him to a wide audience.

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Today's Topics:

   1. Burke and Sontag (Wess, Robert Victor)



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Wess, Robert Victor" <robert.wess at oregonstate.edu<mailto:robert.wess at oregonstate.edu>>
To: "kb at kbjournal.org<mailto:kb at kbjournal.org>" <kb at kbjournal.org<mailto:kb at kbjournal.org>>
Cc:
Bcc:
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2019 19:18:25 +0000
Subject: [KB] Burke and Sontag
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





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