SUSAN SONTAG: I remember when she first appeared, appearance signifying in this case not a mere social presence but the offering of intense literary work in an arresting combination with the person, the one writing. Of course, it was immediately clear that she was a romantic. Not a romantic prisoner of love or private history, but a romantic of the intellectual life. She brought to mind as a dramatic entrance the young Mary McCarthy, whom she does not resemble in thought or temperament—and naturally enough, since romantics and intellectuals are personal and have qualities seldom free of disturbance and jarring particularity.
Here was a young woman of special gifts and high style: opinionated, even intransigent, and yet unmarked by dank truculence, indolent fixity. She was liberated from provincialism and the narrowing vanities that leave one standing where one began. But not free of vanity, if that may mean a certain airy certainty of self requisite for difficult undertakings. So she was then, in her twenties.
Now, Susan Sontag lives half the year in New York and the other half in Paris. Not so long ago, she was in Venice for a conference on the art of dissidents; she was in California lecturing on photography. Her mother lives in Honolulu and she visits there. She went to Hanoi during the Vietnam War; she has made a trip to China, to India, to Israel. Nevertheless, because she is a writer, she has spent most of her time alone in her room, slowly enduring the struggle to create serious work.
A list of the titles of her writings would leave the page black with capital letters, but it must be recorded that she has published two novels, two books of literary and cultural criticism. A brilliant work, On Photography, came out last year; this month will bring the publication of Illness as Metaphor; a collection of short stories will be published in the fall. She has written and directed two full-length films, shot in Sweden, and a complex documentary on Israel. She is in her mid-forties.
So there it is—and there she is—beads on a string that cannot, in the listing, offer the shine of quality and oddity glistening in the works. Here, in America, our reverence is most often stirred by a creative exclusiveness: the poet, the musician, the painter, the scientist, the great performers. We seem to feel most secure with genius in a singular concentration and with the kind of artist who “has a mind so fine no idea can violate it,” as T. S. Eliot said not quite seriously of Henry James.
Susan Sontag is all ideas. Her essays, of course, and even her films and short stories show the habit of mind of one trained as a philosopher, as she was. Philosophical and theoretical speculation is a natural turn of her mind, and yet the world of the university and the academy is not congenial to her way of thinking or to her writing. She was a prodigy, entering the University of Chicago at fifteen and going on to Harvard for graduate study. Beyond that, the “crisis of identity” led to her most important creative discovery: French bohemian intellectual life, an insistent avant-garde mode, an obsessive concern with form—form as an idea and a practice, a fascination with the extreme, with the theatrical gesture, with outlandish, anarchic styles. (“Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” for instance.)
With the free, independent, unpredictable reach of her interests, the rich grounding in high culture, Susan Sontag became, is, an original observer of popular culture, bizarre creatures, pornography, happenings—and always politics, opera, ballet, and literature. Scarcely anyone is more alive to the interesting, more willing to contemplate its aesthetic shape, more willing to experience the flow of styles and assumptions. She is very shrewd and witty in defining the sounds of the crash of contemporary life.
In her sensibility, the movies are everywhere: not just in the many essays she has written on Godard, Bergman, and others, and not only in her films. Film art and even film anti-art cast their lights on the pages of her novels and stories. Ellipses, obscurities, innovations reveal this cinematic saturation, always in a singular blending with avantgarde European writing. It is not for nothing that Susan spent her youth in California, flew off” to the University of Chicago and then on to Paris.
She is a feminist very much in the way certain persons are known to be cradle Catholics. Thus she is not burdened as a thinker with the pieties and reductions that sometimes attend conversion. She married very young, was divorced, raised her son, made her own living, created herself. That creation is the most interesting American woman of her generation.
1978