Like Maria Callas’s voice, Susan Sontag’s mind, to borrow a phrase from the great filmmaker Werner Schroeter (one of countless underappreciated artists Sontag championed), was “a comet passing once in a hundred years.” In a dauntingly, often viciously anti-intellectual society, Sontag made being an intellectual attractive.
She was the indispensible voice of moral responsibility, perceptual clarity, passionate (and passionately reasonable) advocacy: for aesthetic pleasure, for social justice, for unembarrassed hedonism, for life against death. Sontag took it as a given that our duty as sentient beings is to rescue the world. She knew that empathy can change history.
She set the bar of skepticism as high as it would go. Allergic to received ideas and their hypnotic blandishments, she was often startled to discover how devalued the ethical sense, and the courage to exercise it, had become in American consumer culture.
Sontag had impeccable instincts for saying and doing what needed to be said and done while too many others scrambled for the safety of consensus. Hence the uproar when she declared, at the height of Solidarity’s epochal crisis in 1982, that “communism . . . is fascism with a human face.” Hence also the depressingly rote indignation mobilized against her response to a New Yorker survey about the 9-11 attacks, published on September 24, 2001—a survey that most respondents used to promote themselves, their latest books, the depth of their own “feelings.”
Of course it was, and still is, easier for many Americans to pretend the events of 9-11 were inexplicable eruptions of violence against American virtuousness, perpetrated by people who “hate us for our freedoms.” Indeed, the habitual assertion of the American way of life’s superiority is probably what persuades supposedly serious writers to weigh in on a civil catastrophe by promoting their own narrow interests, dropping in news of their current travel itineraries, their marriages, their kids—oh, and how shaken they were by the tragic events.
It takes unusual bravery to cite, in a large media venue, cause and effect as operant elements in a man-made emergency—especially when the programmed pieties and entrenched denial mechanisms of society run in the opposite direction.
Sontag drew her own better-than-well-informed conclusions about what happened on 9-11. The habit of independent thought has so little currency in 21st-century America that dissent is the last thing most Americans consider worth protecting.
What Jean Genet referred to as “the far Right and its imbecilic mythology” have already been activated in several “obituary” pieces, including one fulminating, hateful dismissal of Sontag’s entire lifework. It’s lowering to realize how terminally bitter the American right really is: Even in its current triumphal micro-epoch, it needs to demonize somebody.
Sontag’s political “lapses,” cited even in sympathetic articles, are in fact the public moments one should most admire her for. She was usually right, and when she hadn’t been, she said so. It’s customary these days to damn people for “inconsistency,” as if it’s somehow virtuous to persist forever in being wrong. Sontag interrogated her own ideas with merciless rigor, and when she discovered they no longer applied, or were defectively inadequate or just plain bad, she never hesitated to change her mind in public.
Certainly she felt the same revulsion and horror at the atrocity of 9-11 that any New Yorker, any citizen of the world, did. But she also had the moral scruple to connect the attacks to generally untelevised, lethal American actions abroad, to the indiscriminate carnage that has typified both state policy and terrorist violence in the new century. Where, exactly, does the difference lie?
Unlike our government’s loudest warmongers and their media cheerleaders, Sontag put her own life on the line, many times, in defense of her principles—in Israel during the Six Day War, in Hanoi during the American bombardment, in Sarajevo throughout much of the conflict there. Like Genet, she was willing to go anywhere, at a moment’s notice, out of solidarity with people on the receiving end of contemporary barbarism.
The range of her talents and interests was no less impressive than her moral instincts. She once told me that “every good book is worth reading at least once” (in her case, it was usually at least twice). Her appetite for cultural provender—opera, avant-garde theater, film, dance, travel, historical inquiry, cuisine of any kind, architecture, the history of ideas—was inexhaustible. If you told her about something she didn’t know, she soon knew more about it than you did. She routinely went directly from a museum to a screening, then to a concert; and if there was a kung fu movie playing somewhere after all that, off she went, whether you were still ambulatory or not.
I know I’m in a minority, but I remain a fan of Sontag’s early novels The Benefactor and Death Kit—Sontag herself cared little for them in later years. Not enough people have seen the films she directed: Duet for Cannibals and Brother Carl in Sweden, Promised Lands in Israel, Unguided Tour in Venice. These early and middle works could be considered noble experiments, operating on a high level of fluency and daring.
None of these works are as sumptuously realized as her best essays, or her later novels The Volcano Lover and In America. At times, her reverence for the European modernists who influenced her eclipses her own seldom mentioned, American gift for absurdist black humor. (Death Kit has anything but a reputation for hilarity, but it’s one of the most darkly funny narratives written in America during the Vietnam War.) Many of Sontag’s essays, for that matter, have threads of Firbankian whimsy and manic satire running through them—and no, I’m not referring to “Notes on Camp.”
There’s no way to summarize her restless cultural itinerary and her immense services to “the republic of letters” in the space of an obituary. What I can speak of, here, again, is the indelible example she set as a moral being, citizen, and writer. She sedulously distinguished between the merely personal and the insights personal experience generated. “I” appears less frequently in her writings than in those of any other significant American writer I can think of. If Sontag was less averse, in recent times, to saying “I,” it could be that she at last realized she’d earned the authority for “I” to mean more, coming from her, than it does coming from most people. (In America, “I” isn’t simply a pronoun, but a way of life.)
It’s my guess that growing up in Arizona and Southern California, among people who placed no special value on intelligence and none at all on its cultivation, Sontag’s first line of defense against being hurt by other people was the same thing (aside from physical beauty) that distinguished her from ordinary people—that awesome intellect. She could be ferociously assertive, and at times even hurtful, without at all realizing the tremendous effect she had on people. In some ways, like any American intellectual, she often felt slighted or underappreciated, even when people were actually paying keen attention to her.
Her personal magnetism was legendary. Even in later times, she had the glamour of a film star. She almost never wore makeup (though she did, finally, find a shade of lipstick she could stand), and usually wore black slacks, black sweaters, and sometimes a black leather jacket, though occasionally the jacket would be brown. She had the body language of a young person: She once explained to me that people get old when they started acting like old people.
I never heard her say a dumb word, even in moments of evident distress. She did, from time to time, do things that seemed quite odd, but then, who doesn’t? Her will to keep experiencing, learning, and feeling “the old emotions”—and, sometimes, to make herself empty, restock her interiority, break with old ideas—came with a project of self-transcendence that Sontag shouldered, like Sisyphus’s stone, cheerfully, “with fervor.”
She once told Dick Cavett, after the first of her struggles with cancer, that she didn’t find her own illness interesting. She stipulated that it was moving to her, but not interesting. To be interesting, experience has to yield a harvest of ideas, which her illness certainly did—but she communicated them in a form useful to others in ways a conventional memoir couldn’t be. (To be useful, one has to reach others on the level of thought, not only feeling—though the two are inseparable.)
In light of her own illness, she set about removing the stigma then attached to cancer, dismantling the punitive myths this fearsome illness generated at the time. We don’t look at illness in the same way we did before Illness as Metaphor and the widespread examination of our relationship to medicine that it triggered.
Her detachment in this regard was a powerful asset. Many years ago, I went with her one morning to her radiologist. The radiologist had gotten back some complicated X-rays and wanted to discuss them. On the way uptown, Susan was incredibly composed, long resigned to hyper-vigilance as the price of staying alive.
At the clinic, she disappeared into the doctor’s office for a worryingly long time. When she came out, finally, she was laughing.
“She put the X-rays up,” Susan told me, “and said, ‘This really doesn’t look good.’ So I looked them over, and thought about it. Then I said, ‘You’re right. These don’t look good. But you know something, these aren’t my X-rays.’ ”
They weren’t her X-rays. Her most recent procedure had left a temporary, subcutaneous line of staple sutures running from her throat to her abdomen. The tiny metal clamps she knew were there would have glowed on an X-ray.
For some reason this was the first memory that flashed to mind when the sad news came that she was gone.