"Everything that surrounds my meeting with him has the color of shame: so begins Susan Sontag's story "Pilgrimage," which appeared in this magazine in 1987. The meeting is with the exiled German novelist Thomas Mann, at his home in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. The year, Sontag says, is 1947; she is fourteen. Her favorite novel is "The Magic Mountain," Mann's panorama of Europe at twilight, which mirrors her own life in uncanny ways."
"An awkward, desultory conversation ensues. Mann has "only sententious formulas to deliver." Sontag replies with "tongue-tied simplicities." The sense of anticlimax is crushing. "Years later, when I had become a writer, when I knew many other writers, I would learn to be more tolerant of the gap between the person and the work. Yet even now the encounter still feels illicit, improper.""
"Over the years I have kept it a secret, as if it were something shameful. Shame? "I don't remember anything like that," Merrill Rodin told me the other day. "I felt more of a sense of awe, almost intimidation." Sontag's childhood friend is ninety-five and in fine health, his eyes bright, his lampshade mustache imposing."
Susan Sontag recounts a formative encounter with exiled German novelist Thomas Mann at his Pacific Palisades home in 1947 when she was fourteen years old. An admirer of Mann's "The Magic Mountain," Sontag and her friend Merrill boldly contacted Mann and secured a meeting. The conversation proved deeply disappointing, with Mann offering only "sententious formulas" while Sontag remained "tongue-tied." The stark gap between Sontag's idealized vision of the literary giant and the mundane reality of the man himself left her feeling ashamed and conflicted. Decades later, Sontag reflected on this encounter as a formative lesson about the inevitable distance between an artist's work and their actual person, though the memory retained its sting.
Read at The New Yorker
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