This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense
friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity
status--Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in
Europe, though also for a time in the US. For audiences at Woody Allen
movies Sontag was the prime embodiment of the term "intellectual," whose
famous 1965 essay "Notes on Camp" won her an enormous following. For
viewers of French, German and British television over decades Steiner
was the primary interview show talking head, igniting controversy on
many fronts, while also commanding a loyal audience for thirty years as
a book critic at The New Yorker. To know them, as this memoir suggests,
was often to feel overmatched and yet also bemused and awe-struck. Both
of them gave off an air of omniscience and self-confidence, as if they
had taken to heart the words of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who
wrote, "I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me."
Maestros & Monsters is the work of a well-known public intellectual who
was close to Sontag and Steiner over a half century, and who managed to
bring them together on several occasions--the only times they ever met.
Those encounters are among the most bizarre episodes in this narrative,
which also features extended encounters with such literary figures as
Arthur Koestler, Edward Said, Phillip Rieff, James Wood and others.
