The Benefactor

by Susan Sontag

  I do not remember the rest of the discussion, except that I was over-ruled when I made some specific suggestions for changing the script. My colleagues, understandably, did not share my desire to reshape this fascinating subject in the langorous style of my dreams. But I would still argue that Larsen’s interpretation was lacking in imaginativeness. To my taste, he devoted too much of the film to the nobleman’s association with the adolescent patriot; and in the final scenes he failed to do justice to the astonishing procession in which the sodomist and mass murderer was followed to the scaffold by hundreds of weeping citizens, many of them the parents of his tiny victims.

  Why did they weep? Could it be because his crimes had somehow the odor of sanctity? More exactly, that the nobleman was a convert to certain heretical religious ideas, which prompted and even sanctified his abominable crimes? And that peasant girl, the national heroine of my country—I argued that his association with her did not partly redeem him, as Larsen would have it. On the contrary. Was not the girl herself brought to trial and burned at the stake? The virgin and the child-murderer, these two persons so opposite in the judgment of history and apparently connected only by the exploits of battle, did have something in common, namely heresy, the principal charge (be it remembered) in both trials. Both were accused of heresy first, of insurrection and crime only secondarily. Is it possible that both were punished for something never disclosed in either trial? According to Professor Bulgaraux, who sent me several convincing letters on the subject, both were volunteer scapegoats of an underground cult whose doctrines bear some resemblance to the ideas of the Autogenists.

  But if this is so, then one must say that of the two it was the nobleman who better fulfilled the sacred mission of defiling himself in the eyes of the world. The peasant girl, though she wore men’s clothing and heard voices and went into battle, could not avoid being made into a saint by the Church which condemned her. But no church, however imaginative, could canonize the nobleman. Thus to make his crimes issue from sexual distress, as Larsen would have it, showed the greatest lack of moral tact. His crimes were monstrous because they were real, whatever the motive. Don’t exonerate him, I urged Larsen. Respect his choice and don’t try to turn evil into good. Let nothing be interpreted. No part of the modern sensibility is more tiresome than its eagerness to excuse and to have one thing always mean something else!

  By these reflections, I was moved to adopt a new attitude while before the camera. For once in my brief acting career, I played a role without duplicity. I played the priest as though I had nothing but his words in my head, his compassion and horror inscribed on my face. When I pleaded with the nobleman to repent, I truly prayed that his crimes could be undone and all the little children be restored to their mothers. I hoped that the actor who played the nobleman thought of those crimes as real. How else could he pretend to commit them, repent of them, or die for them?

  My performance in this film was my last work as an actor. It is not for me to say whether it was my best, though the reader may perhaps have an opportunity to judge for himself, since the film is still often shown by film societies. All that is important to mention now is that my new attitude toward acting, in which I wanted to be without reservation or inner distraction the character I was playing, had abolished the value of acting for me. There was no point in being someone else, if I were really to be someone else. For then I might just as well be myself. Besides, the work was demanding and left me less time than I wished for the occupations of solitude.

  I returned to the capital after the conclusion of the film, and took a room near the great market in the center of the city. This was furnished, or rather unfurnished, in the same way as my old place. Lucrezia became again my constant companion, and I shared with her the ideas about good and evil which arose from my audiences with Professor Bulgaraux and my part in the film about the nobleman. She had a quiet, independent intelligence and could never have needed any liberating counsel from her mother. One day, however, something happened which changed our friendship, or rather, prevented our friendship from changing. She had come to my room directly from the hairdresser, and after admiring her coiffure and thinking of taking her into my arms, I had offered her a drink and we had begun to talk.

  “Hippolyte,” she said, breaking into our conversation which was about the Offending Nobleman, as Lucrezia and I called him, “do you ever think of Mother?”

  “Yes,” I replied truthfully, “I do.”

  “I know Mother liked you very much.” I reached for her hand, sympathetically. “Do you think it’s very wicked of me not to miss her?”

  “I’m sure she is happy, wherever she is,” I said.

  “I do hope so,” said Lucrezia. “Because I have received a letter which purports to be from her—although Mother had always a rather elegant script and this letter is unevenly written, on soiled brown paper. This letter, Hippolyte,” she grasped my hand warmly, “contains many curious reproaches, directed to you as well as to me.”

  “Tell me about them,” I said.

  “Oh, Hippolyte, I didn’t think Mother loved you.” She brushed some moisture from one eye.

  “But surely you knew….”

  “Yes, yes,” she said hurriedly. “But I didn’t know you went away with her. She says she is so angry with you she will not come back. She says that she imagines I, too, am happier without her. And that she is very happy where she is. Oh, my dear, she does not sound at all happy, does she?”

  “I think she has every reason to be happy,” I said, “if the fulfillment of a powerful fantasy ever brings happiness.”

  “Only it would be most unlike Mother to be happy, Hippolyte. She is not that sort of person. Perhaps it isn’t Mother, after all. The person who wrote the letter signs herself ‘Scheherazade.’ ”

  “It is your mother, I am sure.”

  “But do you know how she is living now? The letter doesn’t give any details.”

  “When last I saw her,” I explained, “she had entered the household of an Arab merchant who greatly desired her. This seemed to be the perfect solution to her perennial dissatisfactions. You remember, do you not, the letters she wrote you?”

  “Yes! Were you with her when she wrote those embarrassing letters, Hippolyte? Did you read them? Oh, but I’m becoming jealous again! The letters were very touching, weren’t they?”

  “Your mother wanted to try a way of life entirely different from the one she led here, Lucrezia, but she didn’t have the courage to discard this life by herself. She had to be helped.”

  “Pushed.”

  “She wanted to be pushed.”

  “Oh, Hippolyte, sometimes I wish you would push me!”

  “You are not at all like your mother,” I reminded her.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s true. I don’t long for the primitive, as Mother did. Life in this careful city is already too primitive for me.”

  “Does your mother ask for money?”

  “She hints at ransom. She says she’s a prisoner of love. That sounds as if we could coax her to come back.”

  “Would you allow me to donate the sum of thirteen thousand francs toward her return?”

  “Hippolyte, that will pay for ten returns! Why so much?”

  “Because that was the amount for which I sold her. I did not dare take less, for fear the merchant would not value her properly.”

  And for a while the conversation turned to the question of how money may operate to create value as well as to measure it.

  “I am very fond of money,” Lucrezia said in a self-congratulatory tone. “While Mother, who is more generous than I, will only give the money to her lover. Perhaps she will buy him a herd of camels with it.”

  Frowning at her snobbery, I said, “I give you the money in her name.” I went to a drawer, and handed the sum to her, still in the merchant’s envelope, with a feeling of relief. I should never have liked it to appear that money played anything but an aesthetic role in that curious incident.

>   “I begin to think you were very fond of my mother,” Lucrezia said, taking off her gloves to count the bills, and then putting them in her bag.

  I became annoyed. “She was most generous with herself to me,” I said.

  “Nonsense!”

  I was astonished at the way Lucrezia persisted in this scene of jealousy which I could not believe was sincere.

  “What do you want from me, Lucrezia?”

  “Nothing,” she said, reddening. It embarrassed her to discover herself seeking intimacy instead of conferring it.

  When she said she wanted nothing from me, I resolved to give nothing more than I had thus far. For some time I had been in doubt about my friendship with Lucrezia. My restrained conduct with her testifies to that. I was not unaware that there was something unseemly in my inheriting the daughter after enjoying the mother; and considerations of good taste, although not in the way they did with my friend Jean-Jacques, have always weighed strongly with me. Now I saw that there was no reason for us to be more to each other than we already were. Who knows what perverse impulses lay behind Lucrezia’s feeling for me, which I had up to that point taken for granted, being accustomed at that age and state of good looks to the attention of women.

  Lucrezia and I continued talking until dark, and then went out to stroll by the river. We were speaking then, as I recall, of how coarsely praise and blame are distributed in the world. We agreed that many bad things are commonly praised, and many good things are censured.

  “Do you admire effort?” I asked. “Do you esteem feelings which correct themselves, and behavior which does not rest until it is different?”

  “No,” she replied, “I don’t admire effort. I admire excellence, which is less accomplished when it results from effort. And less graceful, too.”

  For a moment, I wondered why I was set on rejecting the affection of this intelligent woman with whom I shared so many ideas. Whenever we disagreed, as now, I enjoyed her even more.

  “And beauty?” I asked. Lucrezia had blonde hair, china-blue eyes, and very fine features.

  “Oh, yes. I forgive anything that is beautiful.”

  “I don’t see why we should praise beauty,” I replied thoughtfully. “It’s too easy to learn from the world what is beautiful and what is not. We should allow ourselves to find beautiful anything which holds our complete interest—those things, and only those things, no matter how disfigured and terrifying.”

  “In short,” she said quizzically, “the only thing you admire is what preoccupies you.”

  “I admire the preoccupying. I respect the preoccupied.”

  “Nothing else! Where is love? Fear? Remorse?”

  “Nothing else.”

  After this conversation adjourned, I dismissed Lucrezia from my thoughts as anything other than a graceful and urbane friend. The spectre of her mother had risen between us, and I could not bear the thought of there being any rivalry between the two women, either in Lucrezia’s mind or in mine. Although we continued to meet, often to go to the films together, Lucrezia accepted the stasis in our friendship and turned her amorous interest to more promising candidates.

  For the months that followed, I find more dreams in my notebooks and a greater serenity in their interpretation. My effort was less, my attention greater. I still pursued the same preoccupations, but I learned from the dreams how to pursue them better. The dreams taught me the secret of perpetual presentness, and freed me from the desire to adorn my life and my conversation.

  Let me explain. Imagine that something happens—say, an act of assault—and someone comes in immediately afterwards.

  “What happened?” asks the visitor.

  “Help!” Moans, cries, and so forth.

  “What happened?”

  “They … came … through the window.” More moans.

  “And then?” says the visitor.

  “They … hit me … with an axe.”

  In these first moments, the bleeding victim is not interested in persuading anyone of the reality of the event. It has just occurred, and he cannot imagine how anyone could doubt it. Should anyone doubt the story, he has his wounds to show. No, even this would not occur to him. Should anyone doubt the story, he would not care, as long as a doctor is sent for. His wounds would be companions enough.

  It is not until later, when the wounds have begun to heal, that the victim wants to talk. And as the event becomes more distant in time, the victim—healed and restored to the bosom of his family—gives it dramatic form. He embellishes his narrative and sets it to music. He puts drums in the background. The axe gleams. He sees the whites of the man’s eyes. He tells his children that the attacker wore a blue scarf. “And he sprang through the window with a great noise,” says the aging and healthy victim to his children. “He raised his arm and I was terrified and….”

  Why has he become so verbose? Because he no longer has the companionship of his pain. He has only an audience, whose attentiveness he doubts. In telling the story he is attempting to convince his audience that “it” really happened, that it was like this, that he felt violent emotions and was in great danger. He craves reassurance. He also learns he can collect from the telling—money, respect, sympathy. With time, the event is not quite real to him, to whom it happened. He believes less in the reality of the assault; more real to him are all the ways he has found to describe it. His narrative becomes persuasive.

  But in the beginning, when the assault was real, when it did not occur to him to persuade anyone, his narration was laconic and honorable.

  This is what I learned from dreams. Dreams always have the quality of being present—even when, as I am doing, one relates them ten, twenty, thirty years after. They do not age, or become less credible; they are what they are. The loyal dreamer does not seek his hearer’s credence, he does not need to convince his hearer that such and such amazing thing happened in the dream. Since all events in the dream are equally fantastic, they are independent of the assent of other people. This reveals, by the way, the falsity of that line which people of taste insist on drawing and redrawing between the banal and the extraordinary. All events in dreams are extraordinary, and banal, at the same time.

  In dreams, assaults happen. We kill, we fall, we fly, we rape. But things are as they are. We accept them in the dream; they are irrevocable, though often without consequences. When someone disappears from the stage of the dream, one does not in the dream wonder where he has gone. Anyone relating his dream who says, “The clerk left me at the counter. I believe he went to consult his supervisor about my request,” is telling the dream wrong. He is not being honest: he is trying to persuade. One says, “I was at the counter talking to a clerk. Then I was alone.”

  I should like to describe my life to you with the same evenness that one recounts one’s dreams. Such a narration would be the only honest one. If I have not entirely succeeded in doing this, at least I continue to aim at this goal as I write. I have tried not to extract from my life any excitement which it does not yield of itself, or to over-stimulate the reader with names and dates, with tiresome descriptions of my own person and appearance, of those whom I knew, with the furniture of rooms, the progress of wars, the swirl of cigarette smoke, and other matters which took place concurrently with the encounters and conversations I have reported. That only one passion, or one idea, he made clear is task enough to fill a hundred volumes—and beyond my powers to do more, in these pages, than to suggest.

  NINE

  One day I had a visit from Frau Anders’ husband. Let me correct myself: from Herr Anders. Now that his wife was gone, he certainly deserved the recognition of his own identity. Yet her husband he remained to me, even then, for all I knew of him (mainly from Frau Anders) was that he had a keen sense of smell, that his hobby was taxidermy, and that she suspected he had never been unfaithful to her. Their daughter Lucrezia took no notice of his existence.

  I was dismayed when I saw who was at my door, for I anticipated a storm of reproaches, at the least
a tale of loneliness and misery. If he had really loved her, how could I show Herr Anders that his wife’s removal to the land of her desire was as beneficial for him as it was for her? But he didn’t seem irate, only uncomfortable. I begged him to come in.

  Without ceremony, for he had the manners of a busy man, he told me what he had come to say. I learned that he believed that his wife had retired to a nunnery; there was no question in his mind that her holy vows must be respected. When I asked him how he had gained this impression, he told me of a letter which he had from her six months after her departure. He also told me—and seemed surprised that I did not know it—that in this letter Frau Anders named me her trustee in the world, the executor as it were of her mundane estate, her intermediary. Although this tale of the nunnery struck me as a rather malicious joke on the part of Frau Anders, I felt I had to go along with her wishes, and asked him how I might fulfill my duty.

  Herr Anders had a message to transmit to his wife, but since he did not know her whereabouts, he asked me to communicate with her. He wished to remarry.

  “But,” I replied, somewhat disconcerted, “I don’t know exactly where she is. Several years have passed and….”

  “Please!” He gazed at me imploringly. “I know I may divorce her on the grounds of desertion. But I want her to know. Do you understand? I don’t want to marry without her consent, and her blessing.”

  I didn’t understand, and therefore did not know what to say. “If God has given her a better life,” he added softly, “I don’t want to interfere with her happiness.” It occurred to me that Herr Anders thought he was becoming religious.

  I was silent a moment more. The husband of my lost mistress regarded me quizzically; a look of apprehension, which shaded off into animosity, appeared in his face. “You are concealing something from me,” he said bitterly. And at that he settled himself more firmly against the wall (I had no chairs in the room, and did not dare invite him to sit on the floor), and awaited my reply.