Maestros & Monsters

ROBERT BOYERS, born in 1942, founded the American quarterly magazine Salmagundi in 1965 and continues to edit the journal, to teach at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and to direct the New York State Summer Writers Institute. As a graduate student at New York University in 1965 he first got to know George Steiner, and a year later began correspondence with Susan Sontag, these initial contacts leading to intense, sometimes difficult friendships that persisted over decades. Boyers is the author of hundreds of periodical essays and of a dozen books, most recently a widely discussed book on the "culture wars" entitled The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy & The Hunt for Political Heresies. His other books include two works on politics and the novel, a volume of short stories and a 2015 book on The Fate of Ideas. In 2009 he edited and wrote the introduction for George Steiner at The New Yorker, a book that has been published in more than twenty languages.

Short Biographies of the Subjects of This Memoir:


SUSAN SONTAG, born in 1933, was the best-known public intellectual in the United States for about forty years, roughly from the appearance of her famous essay Notes on Camp in 1965 until the time of her death in 2004.Though she made feature films and wrote a good deal of fiction--she won the National Book Award for her novel In America in 2002--she was principally read and admired as an essayist, critic and polemicist. She was also widely admired as a human rights activist who wrote about her experiences in war zones in Sarajevo, the Middle East and Vietnam. Her many books include Illness as Metaphor, On Photography, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, Under the Sign of Saturn and At the Same Time. A biography of Sontag by Benjamin Moser won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020.

GEORGE STEINER, born in 1929, was a European intellectual and man of letters who attracted an enormous following in the United States, initially based upon the publication of early books like The Death of Tragedy, Tolstoy or Dostoyevski and Language & Silence. But his influence also had much to do with his role as a regular book critic for The New Yorker Magazine and with the periodical writing he did for the leading newspapers and magazines. Many readers regarded him as the most learned thinker of his generation, and also as the most thrilling lecturer they had ever seen, His major books include After Babel, Antigones, Extraterritorial, Real Presences and a controversial “Holocaust novel” entitled The Portage to San Cristobal of AH. He died in 2020.

Introduction Part One: The Fascination of What's Difficult: Susan Sontag     
Chapter 1  Seriously Uncool?                                                          21
Chapter 2  Is This Rude?                                                                  34
Chapter 3  Disappointments and Dismissals                               44
Chapter 4  Authority Figure.                                                            58
Chapter 5  Turn of the Cultural Wheel                                          70
Chapter 6  The Therapeutic                                                            80
Chapter 7  To Teach or Not                                                             90
Chapter 8 Motherhood and Sexuality.                                          99
Chapter 9  Rhapsode                                                                      106


Part Two: Impossible to Tell: George Steiner
Chapter 1  A First Meeting.                                                             113
Chapter 2   I Had a Good Time                                                       120
Chapter 3  Under Attack                                                                  128
Chapter 4  Master Teacher                                                              139
Chapter 5  An Evening with Arthur Koestler.                                151
Chapter 6  A Brave Beginning                                                         162     
Chapter 7  Creative Distortion.                                                       170
Chapter 8  I Wish You Hadn't Done That.                                      182
Chapter 9. An Academy of One                                                       195


Part Three
Afterword                                                                                            203
Notes                                                                                                   209
Names Index                                                                                      217
About The Author                                                                              219
Photographs                                                                                       221