The Voice Over

The Last Hero

(Susan Sontag)

1.

Susan Sontag’s detractors, of whom she had many, often accused her of exploiting her looks—and it’s true that she gave us plenty to look at. In the posthumous corpus of what remains, which includes books, movies, texts, interviews, and journals, the photographs of the author—young, ageless, aging, dead—are like the temporary exhibit displayed on the honorary first floor of the museum. Some visitors never venture past it, and there’s a reason for that: the images of Sontag don’t tell or comment on her story—they supplant it, providing the viewer with the main thing, an emblem, an identity card: X was here. In the case of Sontag, the sum of her features, repeated in dozens of photographs with the precision of a series of freeze-frames, tells us the following. In this body, in this face, with its high cheekbones and large mouth, with its limited range of poses—hands behind the head or on the hips, hands holding a cigarette, feet up on a table, on the back of the couch, eyes fixed on the viewer (summoning, courageous), but more often looking off to the side (detached, unapproachable), her hands embracing her son—there is drama. This face, this body (in black, white, gray) are perceived simultaneously as the hero and the arena onto which that hero steps out; they tell you: something will happen here, the scene of action has been charged or colored by fate. When we look at an actor’s picture, we are offered an empty house, an empty theater that we have seen fill up with a fictitious life. In the case of Sontag, the house is inhabited, and you can trust that. You have to take her message at face value; her features insist on their own importance—they are part of that larger reality where a private history becomes shared, instructive, exemplary (the last being one of Sontag’s favorite words). The way this woman looks asserts the weight of everything she’s said or done. It is a trademark that you can’t help but trust, the italics that make the text stand out, the packaging that compels you to read its lettering.

Sontag herself would eagerly read photographs as a form of divination, as if they were the entrails of sacrificed animals. Here is the beginning of an essay in Under the Sign of Saturn: “In most of the portrait photographs he is looking down, his right hand to his face. The earliest one I know shows him in 1927—he is thirty-five—with dark curly hair over a high forehead, mustache above a full lower lip: youthful, almost handsome.”¹ The text follows his story (the mid-thirties, their end) noting photographic details: the shape of a hand, the direction of a gaze. Initially the book was going to be named after Thomas Carlyle—“On Heroes and Hero-Worship”—but there could be no story about herself among the texts dedicated to Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes, all inhabitants of an intellectual Valhalla about which she’d dreamed her entire life. In one of her journals she expresses this regret: she wishes she could read—but, it seems, not write herself—“an essay describing me as I have described them. The pathos of intellectual avidity, the collector (mind as every-thing), melancholy & history, arbitrating the moral claim versus aestheticism, and so forth. The intellectual as an impossible project.”²

For Sontag it was impossible or undesirable to describe herself publicly, to talk about herself in the first person. Throughout her life she had turned away from herself with shame and grief, like an artist repeatedly disappointed by the poor material at hand. And she could always find other things (people, topics) that were more important—which underwent an immediate appraisal, and transformed into ideological models for reflection and imitation. Her passion for admiration (“Ah, Susan. Toujours fidèle,” Barthes once said to her³) prevented her, as it seemed at the time, from writing her own magnum opus: her energy was expended on others. But playing this role—the interpreter working at the very front edge of the new, ready to bring words and meanings into a language everyone could understand—is how Sontag found herself in demand in the sixties, to the point where she became a grand idol of success, a Pythia, a queen of clubs—a Mrs. America of new writing. The many photographs that accompany this ascent give it a kind of cinematic quality: these are close-up shots, stills from an unfinished (but ongoing) biopic. The reader-voyeur encounters a rewarding subject in them: these pictures promise a continuation—and they will keep their promise at any cost. David Rieff, Sontag’s only son, never forgave her longtime partner Annie Leibowitz for taking a series of photographs that were final in every sense of the word: Sontag is shown in the weeks of her final battle with cancer, in a bed in the oncology center, amid tubes and monitors, heavy, her legs twisted in effort, her nightgown torn. It’s hard to imagine what the heroine, a theorist of photography and collector of film stills, would have to say about them. Photography (and the constant presence of a lens) seemed to play the role of a supporting narrative in her life, clarifying and commenting on the main events—and as such could have been considered helpful.

The Sontag effect was of course also determined by where it took place: a vacancy for the position of public intellectual, a master of intelligence creating texts about texts, can emerge and be filled where there are not just books but also readers, and universities producing these readers, and newspapers-journals-publishers that allow texts to flourish and multiply. In order for a conversation about the quality of literary criticism to be worthwhile, there has to be sufficient quantity—of printed space, hands eager to fill it, and other hands ready to turn those pages. In 1967, when Sontag’s first book of essays was published in New York (she started out with prose, whose lukewarm reception determined her authorial strategy for years to come), she had people to read and discuss. Still, Sontag’s fame went way beyond what could be expected—especially given that, with few exceptions, the things that interested her, which she was always ready to explain to the city and to the world, lacked mass appeal and were patently closed off to a broader readership. Once again, we hear the voice of the annoyed observer: it turns out that clever Sontag was not possible without beautiful Sontag, that the media persona was the opening act for the author of complex texts about unpopular things.

2.

But Sontag was exactly this—an author interested in the complex and the boring (“We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art”⁴), and had been since birth, with no intention of changing course. In her diaries from her youth, she complains about wasting a Sunday night with her stepfather: a driving lesson, an evening at the movies (which she “pretended to enjoy”). Her morning routine is full of more serious things (“seriousness” is another one of her important words): The Magic Mountain and recordings of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; no more compromises, she promises herself.⁵ Here we see a marvelous blending of a pronounced focus on culture (where “culture” and “Europe” are synonymous) and a less distinct shape, which organizes Sontag’s life goals, one that’s both a close relative of the American dream—a religion of achievement and victory—and quite far from it. “I had the company of the immortal dead—the ‘great people’ (the Nobel Prize winners) of whom I would some day be one. My ambition: not to be the best among them, but only to be one of them, to be in the company of peers and comrades.”⁶

The nostalgia for heroes, for the familiar dead, the dream of a textual immortality, of glory—it touches us because it makes us think of a time that has been recently and hopelessly lost, an old world bound by the borders of a great era. The scale that seems native to Sontag, the yardstick by which she measures herself, are those of the nineteenth century, with its great ideas and even greater expectations. The novelty and advantage of her position is that she is an anachronism; the way she carries herself (and her self) belongs to a different time. Sontag imposes on herself the obligation of nothing other than greatness (one of her later articles, on W. G. Sebald, begins by asking whether literary greatness is still possible in the present day⁷—and in a way her fifty years of authorial practice amount to variously orchestrated attempts to answer this question for herself). The tasks she sets for herself often seem neither literary nor feasible. “To be noble-minded. To be profound. Never to be ‘nice.’” “Remember: this could be my one chance, and the last, to be a first-rate writer” (written when she was past forty). “Well, what’s wrong with projects of self-reformation?” “I smile too much,” “I lack dignity,” “I don’t try hard enough.”⁸

And also:

Proust didn’t know he was writing the greatest novel ever written. (Neither did his contemporaries, even the most admiring, like Rivière.) And it wouldn’t have done him any good if he had. But he did want to write something great.

I want to write something great.⁹

3.

The daily journals from her youth and adulthood are where Susan Sontag’s life project comes to its long-awaited, startling conclusion. We are now presented with texts that are still fresh, that haven’t yet reached a broader readership: the first volume of the diaries, Reborn, was just translated into Russian, and the second, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh, was just published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. And it feels like a long-running Spiderman comic book or the crusade to find the Holy Grail has finally ended in victory—now, in real time, before our very eyes, on the TV screen that Sontag loathed so much. This corpus of diaries and notebooks (the third volume has not been published yet) spans decades, and I believe it may be the most significant thing she ever wrote; it truly resembles “something great,” even though Sontag, who considered herself above all a writer of novels and stories, probably had something different in mind. “Every interesting aesthetic tendency now is a species of radicalism. The question each artist must ask is: What is my radicalism, the one dictated by my gifts and temperament?”¹⁰ she writes elsewhere.

Since the age of twelve, Sontag considered it her duty to keep a journal. The first published entry is from November 1947, when she was almost fourteen, and it is a kind of declaration of independence: the author denies the existence of a personal god (lowercase), sweeps aside the idea of an afterlife, and affirms that the most desirable thing in the world is to stay true to oneself—what she calls Honesty (capitalized). At age seventy, she still subscribed to the same credo, with minor changes and additions; it is no less astounding that her authorial voice managed to preserve that faithfulness to the self, not once breaking or changing. Its intonation of deep conviction, its natural authority (if not authoritarianism) remain unchanged no matter what happens to Sontag; the special character of her writing turns out to be not something acquired through experience but a gift bestowed to her upon birth, a feature of her timbre or diction. The things she says always have a special weight to them; they are pronounced with emphasis—which is why her way of thinking and speaking can easily be described as having pathos. The author of these journals is, as they say, quite full of herself. And yet she can neither change herself (the themes, motifs, field lines of the early entries don’t lose their appeal over time but evolve to include new arguments and interpretations), nor make peace with her own imperfection. The fraternal, comradely respect that Sontag has for her intellect, which had to be nourished, developed, trained, massaged—and the pity, mixed with disdain, with which she regards her own mortal self, her biographical self, would govern her life until its very end. Or at least until 1980, which is where the corpus of journals published so far by David Rieff ends.

Volume one, volume two. Her childhood, her years in school, her first lesbian experience, which is a revelation for Sontag (“Everything begins from now—I am reborn”¹¹). The early, unhappy marriage (“The whole point of marriage is repetition. The best it aims for is the creation of strong, mutual dependencies”¹²), early motherhood, the divorce. Her new life as an independent intellectual—a designation she carried with honor, rejecting any other kind of work. The first books (“At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing”—her son was ten at the time¹³). The initial, rising fame, the years of her might—packed to the brim with projects, ideas and the possibility of new projects and ideas. (The notebooks are full of lists, pages upon pages of books to read, movies to see, foreign or unknown words, quotations and references, explanations for herself, childhood memories, all in neat columns.) The love stories, which, one after the other, split or dwindled into nothingness. The attempts at prose. The attempts at not writing essays. The political activism, which involved repeatedly refining and revising her stance. Cancer and her victory over it, which seemed absolute at the time. Her relationship with Joseph Brodsky (“Story about a poet (Joseph!) so much less, morally, than his work”¹⁴), which was so important to her that she spoke to him in her deathbed delirium. More and more lists of books, movies, ideas, observations.

The demands that Sontag placed on herself all those years, her worship of her idols and her pursuit of new heights to conquer, the high-brow dramaticism of her existence, seemed to imply some kind of hidden wound, a sting of the flesh or the mind—that which, in fact, distinguishes heroes from gods. But to many onlookers, Sontag was also a goddess, impetuous, merciless, almost impossible to comprehend.

That’s how they saw her (noting her height and figure, the flowing scarves, the tall boots), and that’s how they wrote about her: “Susan is … beyond being a lesbian. I know I’m probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn’t really fit into that category. […] I look upon her as, I don’t know, as Venus with Hera, some great goddess that is on Mount Olympus and beyond sexuality, beyond category.”¹⁵ Once you take this approach, the height, the seriousness, the assertive tone, the legendary humorlessness no longer count as merits or flaws—they are a mere footnote to the main text. Sontag comes from a place where they never heard the news about the death of irony, because irony never made an appearance there in the first place. Hence her fierce sensitivity to the appeals of the fascist aesthetic, hence the draw of camp, hence the attraction and resentment toward the avant-garde.

She also liked to think of herself as a diva (and in her late novel In America she tries on the role of an opera singer conquering the New World)—until the simplification that accompanies immortality started to bother her. Any attempt to define her, any reading that linked her to a sole, definite identity provoked annoyance or anger. “Beware of ghettoization,” she warned her son’s girlfriend Sigrid Nunez, then a fledgling writer. “Resist the pressure to think of yourself as a woman writer.”¹⁶ The evolution of Sontag follows the imperative of rejection, of an unwillingness to think of herself in ready-made (and not her very own) terms. Academia, feminism, the gay rights movement—things she felt the need to align with for a while (“I write—and talk—in order to find out what I think”¹⁷), inevitably fell short, and she, like a chess queen, moved on to the next square. In one entry from the late seventies, she finds herself, to her own amazement, a libertarian: “I can be no more. I should not want to be more. I am not interested in ‘constructing’ any new form of society, or joining any party. There is no reason for me to try to locate myself on either the left or the right—or to feel I should. That shouldn’t be my language.”¹⁸ Perhaps, this was not only because she had turned her life into a novel about becoming a writer (inspired by Martin Iden, a book she loved as a child), and still thought of it as a work in progress in her late years, and the rules of plotting required a change. The point of a text, according to Sontag, is to resist interpretation, and her life was not to be an exception. That seemed important to her: “To deprive one’s plight of some of its particularity.”¹⁹ So Brodsky, her peer and comrade, said with annoyance about his prison experience: “I refuse to dramatize all this!”²⁰

4.

Throughout her life, the rejection of I-statements was both a choice and a torment. In all her literary and personal fearlessness, with all the sharp determination of her judgments, it seems that this was the only thing Sontag refused herself. In order to tell her own story, she chose others—the fates of those she admired, in whom she saw a different, better self. To a certain extent this was a sign of respect and trust in the reader: he was offered the chance to reconstruct the author, to round her out, to put her together like a puzzle from what she said in passing in articles, interviews, novels (the best of which, as if embarrassed to be works of fiction, were built on real stories).

The journals crumple this logic like a napkin. The most common and most interesting thing that happens there has nothing to do with the plot, or, more precisely, is the plot itself. These entries can be used as a great example, an experimental (and incessantly active) model, of the workings of the human mind. This is what the intellect looks like, almost autonomous in its freedom, always taking over new surfaces, clearing and honing formulas, endlessly redefining its own position. Thoughts gather and thicken like clouds, and coalesce into unexpected twin kernels; ideas fill up forms that lie fallow; consciousness does drills and tutors itself.

But in both volumes, love and loving take up a great deal of space—and oh how loudly, how hastily and plaintively they speak. The constant discontent with oneself, and the yearning for something other, and the faint dotted line of guilt, shame and failure. Here Sontag’s journals join the long ranks of journals kept by women, and her voice is supplanted by the impersonal voice of pain, which cannot be confused with anything else—everyone knows it, and not just by hearsay. This register struck and confused the first reviewers of Reborn: it seemed to not match their ideas of Sontag the Amazon who wielded her pen like a bayonet; they were embarrassed for her—she turned out or seemed to be as small as the rest of us.

And this as us is a very comforting conclusion: it seems that, at their core, all people are like this—even those whose greatness is unequivocal and obvious. They are awkward, ridiculous, recoiling from their own vulnerability, from their inability to be immortal, from their intentional and involuntary, seen or unseen guilt. That’s what it sounds like, the inner monologue of a person in her basic configuration. Susan Sontag devoted her life to its reworking, its second birth, fiercely ignoring anything that would hinder or distract her—including her own mortality and the metaphysical lifesavers she had denied herself as a child. And the notebooks containing her journals became the by-product, the detritus of this process: a work of fiction and nonfiction, a novel of ideas, a bildungsroman, a love story, a computer quest, a search for the Holy Grail.

2012

Translated by Maria Vassileva