MAESTROS & MONSTERS

Reminiscences of two preternaturally smart contributors to the literary journal Salmagundi by its founding editor.

“I never doubted she was one of the coolest persons I had ever known. That was one reason I was so disappointed on those occasions when she exhibited a side of herself that was decidedly unappealing.” So writes Boyers in this memoir, at once high-minded and gossipy, of time spent with Susan Sontag and George Steiner, two intellectuals who were very much alike and, of course, couldn’t stand each other. Sontag, who occupies the first half of the book, had plenty of unappealing moments, such as when she terrorized a young reporter who had the gall to suggest an interview but had not mastered Sontag’s oeuvre or when Sontag got herself and Boyers ejected from a Manhattan cab by upbraiding its driver for the route he chose. “Few people were prepared to tell Susan to fuck off when she was behaving badly,” he writes. Steiner was one of them, albeit in a superarch manner. Imperious and demanding, Steiner, a noted critic, had the temerity to dress down T.S. Eliot for “neglecting to address the implications of the Holocaust” in his book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. Academics tended to dismiss Steiner as glib and, even worse, “journalistic,” but a riveting lecture on Shakespeare that Boyers attended in Geneva showed just how deeply versed Steiner was in literature and a dozen other disciplines. The same was true of Sontag, who, with Steiner, represented a kind of criticism that was thorough, immersive, and completely uninterested in being politically correct—and yet that was progressive and nonelitist at the same time. “Contrary, polarizing, sometimes abrasive, both could seem at times unlovable,” Boyers writes, and yet he clearly loves both of them as literary and intellectual exemplars—and ornery people, too.

A nimble, eminently readable tribute to a pair of literary giants who weren’t shy of calling themselves such.