* * *
Against Interpretation is a work of the first half of the sixties, when things seemed to be changing for the better. “There was so little nostalgia,” Sontag wrote. “In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment.” The triumph over Hitler, the civil rights movement, the rise of Kennedy, gave Sontag’s generation a progressive view: not because they were unaware of injustices, but because they had seen them overcome.
But darkness, the gnostics preached, would always follow light. For Susan’s generation, that darkness could be resumed in one word: Vietnam. During the Kennedy administration, heavily staffed with the same kinds of people Susan found in the cinemas and galleries of Manhattan, American “advisers” began arriving in Saigon. They did so in the same spirit of idealism that brought Kennedy to power, wrote the novelist Philip Caputo.
We went overseas full of illusions, for which the intoxicating atmosphere of those years was as much to blame as our youth. War is attractive to young men who have known nothing about it, but we had also been seduced into uniform by Kennedy’s challenge to ask what you can do for your country and by the missionary idealism he had awakened in us.15
Before the full consequences of this idealism became clear, Susan had been absent from politics. This was fairly typical. In the fifties, many writers had retreated into the private dream: the individual drama was at the center of their literature, including the writings of the Beats. Questions of politics and society, so urgent a generation before, had retreated. Whenever politics appears in Susan’s journals, it is—as in Cuba—in relation to aesthetics. In America—as with Flaming Creatures—her political interventions were limited to artistic matters.
In the fifties, after all, the main goal of American foreign policy, the containment of communism, was fairly uncontroversial. Liberals quarreled about how best to do it, but mostly agreed that containment was desirable; even Partisan Review supported the Cold War and American backing of free regimes. The problem was the meaning of the word “free,” which was nowhere more dubiously applied than to the shambolic dictatorship of South Vietnam.
Even before the Vietnam War emerged as the most violently divisive issue in the country, a new radicalism had been afoot. Vietnam played almost no role in the early years of the “New Left,” which had emerged by 1962.16 It incorporated many of Marcuse’s ideas about how a quest for personal liberation might inform a broader politics, and condemned America as doomed by capitalism, imperialism, and racism. The Vietnam War seemed perfectly conceived to illustrate these ideas.
It split the Left. The New Left mocked the liberals who retained a sentimental belief in American goodness. By 1965, when bombing of North Vietnam began, the radicals were painting the liberals as naïve and credulous, and Susan’s circles gravitated toward the radical position. The New York Review of Books, with which she had been involved from the beginning, became known as “The New York Review of Vietnam.” By 1967, when it published a how-to diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its cover, it was the most radical publication in the country.
Despair at the mounting carnage led her, for the first time in her life, into active protest. On February 21, 1966, a month after the publication of Against Interpretation, she joined other writers, including Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, William Styron, Bernard Malamud, and Robert Lowell, for a “Read-In” at Town Hall, near Times Square. The gathering was interrupted by an off-duty policeman who walked onstage and sang “God Bless America” in front of a “stark, bamboo-framed backdrop of Photograph showing bombs and dead soldiers and maimed Asian children.”17 The audience, needless to say, did not accept the detective’s invitation to join in his song.
In December 1967, “suggesting for a second as she walked toward the van a Joan of Arc in slacks and boots,” Susan was arrested for blocking the entrance to a draft center in Manhattan.18 “Writers should be in the vanguard of the dissenting minority,” she wrote in March 1966, “those who are afraid, those who are ashamed, those who say No, those who say ‘We are bleeding,’ those who cry Stop.”19
* * *
Soon thereafter, Susan would pen an indictment of America that would long stand as an indictment of Susan Sontag. Her detractors never forgave or forgot “What’s Happening in America.”20 The piece was most remembered for a single phrase: “The white race is the cancer of human history.” The phrasing may have been unfortunate—so much so that she, who never apologized, would later apologize for it, though more for the metaphor than for the underlying sentiment. She was, after all, hardly the only one maddened by Vietnam.
Much that she wrote in the piece was true. The country was founded, at least to a significant degree, on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Many Americans were both extremely violent and extremely moralistic. Much American material civilization was, in fact, trashy; many American politicians were, of course, sleazy. And in the full context of the piece, there does emerge a kind of hope for the country, mainly in the rising generation, in whose interests she saw a
profound concordance between the sexual revolution, redefined, and the political revolution, redefined. That being a socialist and taking certain drugs (in a fully serious spirit: as a technique for exploring one’s consciousness, not as an anodyne or a crutch) are not incompatible, that there is no incompatibility between the exploration of inner space and the rectification of social space.
A consciousness expanded through sex and drugs might rectify all of society, though she does not specify how; in the decade since Bernard Donoughue described her notion of politics as “exploring your sexuality and your whole life and questioning all establishments and disliking all regimes,” she retained the Marcusian hope that this questioning might be expanded into politics.
But practical politics are missing from “What’s Happening in America.” It was true, for example, that American racism seemed to defy solution. It was also true that less than a year before Sontag wrote this piece, the same president she derided for “[scratching] his balls in public” signed the Voting Rights Act, a triumphant sequel to his equally monumental Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the century since Lincoln, no leader had achieved anything comparable. But Sontag, who so keenly perceived the intermixture of darkness and light in herself, could not bring such a nuanced reading to her own country.
The primary repository of virtue in America was the one she herself inhabited. “Cross the Hudson,” she instructed her readers. “You find out that not just some Americans but virtually all Americans” feel that “there are still more hordes of redskins to be mowed down before virtue triumphs.” This was a grotesque caricature; in any case, most of the architects of Vietnam hailed, like Kennedy himself, from the eastern establishment.
But to read this essay is to see that it is not really about “what’s happening” in a huge and complicated country. It is the portrait of an America with a long pedigree in magazines like Partisan Review, where the piece appeared: the Moloch of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!21
Sontag’s America was a literary trope, and her political observations were still, as in Cuba, primarily aesthetic. America was “filled up by new generations of the poor and built up according to the tawdry fantasy of the good life that culturally deprived, uprooted people might have at the beginning of the industrial era,” she wrote. One could grant every single one of her observations—and fully share her outrage at Vietnam—while still knowing that this was not the whole story, that hers was not the “real” America. It was America as camp, as aesthetic phenomenon: America as metaphor.
But what is the right way to watch one’s country go to hell? For the former editor of the Cactus Press, who grew up with the fierce patriotism of a generation who had seen America and its armies as the last, best hope of civilization, it was no easy thing to look on, year after year, as th
ose armies rained death on a distant country that had never threatened the United States. What is the right way to express one’s horror, one’s heartbreak, one’s sense of betrayal?
* * *
There is no mastery without apprenticeship, no success without failure; and in literature, artists who arrive fully formed are so rare as to be practically nonexistent. Their lives would not, in any case, make for illuminating biographies: it is the mind’s progression that gives a narrative to the writer’s life. Failures do not diminish subsequent achievements but, by illustrating the difficulty of attaining them, magnify them instead.
One of Sontag’s failures is universally reckoned to be Death Kit, her second novel, published in August 1967. It became even less loved than The Benefactor, if such a thing is possible: perhaps because a debut is viewed with an indulgence a sequel is rarely granted. Yet its interest lies not in novelistic satisfactions but in the glimpse it offers of Sontag’s thinking about the themes—What is real? How to see?—that run through all her writing. By constantly questioning the reality of her characters and their experiences, she places them at an emotional remove that frustrates a reading on the level of plot and character. But as a witness to her unfolding thought it is unusually rewarding—and the emotional strands, related to the theme announced in the title, are just under the surface—though heavily disguised, in some cases even to the author herself.
One involved a visit Peter Hujar, Paul Thek’s boyfriend, made to Sicily. Hujar was a photographer who—like Paul and Irene—was a great unschooled talent. Born in New Jersey to a semiliterate peasant family of Ukrainian origin, he was abandoned by his father when his mother, a brutish alcoholic waitress who later married a bookie, was pregnant with him. “The way to get on Peter’s A-list, always, was to have been an abused child,” said Stephen Koch. Hujar evolved into a forbidding individual. The first day Koch met him, “he sat there in this Mission rocker Susan had. He sat there. It never rocked.”
He had spent the day in the studio photographing Jayne Mansfield as she was changing from fashion to fashion, nude. Listening to him describing it was like listening to a wonderful novelist. For example, he’d describe her relation to her breasts, how she connected to them, how her nipples were the color of crushed raspberries.22
In 1963, he went to Sicily, and the pictures he brought back bore witness to this novelistic bent, and to this intensity. In 1976, he published them, with a preface by Susan, as Portraits in Life and Death. The portraits in life include Susan and many important figures in the art world, including William Burroughs, Paul Thek, Fran Lebowitz, Robert Wilson, and John Waters. The portraits in death show the macabre assemblage of the bodies of fully dressed citizens, religious and secular, preserved in the Capuchin crypt of Palermo.
They had a “tremendous influence” on Susan, said Koch, and determined much of Paul Thek’s later work: the pieces of meat, the body parts. Thek remembered their first visit:
Their initial effect is so stunning you fall back for a moment and then it’s exhilarating. There are 8,000 corpses—not skeletons, corpses—decorating the walls, and the corridors are filled with windowed coffins. I opened one and picked up what I thought was a piece of paper; it was a piece of dried thigh. I felt strangely relieved and free. It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers. We accept our thing-ness intellectually but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.23
In the final scene of Death Kit, the protagonist wanders through this necropolis. It is a book about a man living—if indeed he is living: we can never be entirely sure—in the kingdom of the dead. “He completely forgets where he is,” she writes on the penultimate page. “Where and in what state is his body.”24
His strange name, Diddy, bears witness to another drama, one Susan herself did not grasp until 1972, when she noted in her diary her astonishment at discovering its meaning.
Diddy, Diddy only. Those five letters. Why? I’ve never understood. Today I saw.
Diddy.
Daddy.
That’s the source of the meditation on death I’ve carried in my heart all my life.
Diddy is 33 years old. So was Daddy when he died.
Did-he? Did he die? The theme of false death, la mort equivoque, la resurrection inattendu [sic] in all my work—25
* * *
Heading from New York to Buffalo, Diddy’s train is delayed in a tunnel. The wait stretches on, and Diddy leaves the train and finds a workman, Angelo Incardona, whom he murders with a crowbar. Back in the compartment, none of the other five passengers has noticed his absence. His eye falls on a blind girl, Hester, and he confesses to her, but she assures him, as in the dreamworld of The Benefactor, that he has only fantasized this crime: “You never left the train,” she tells him. “You were never out of the compartment. Believe me.”
Has she, who cannot see, seen something that he, who can, cannot? In Buffalo, Diddy learns that a workman had in fact been killed, but not by a crowbar: he was struck by the train, which never stopped. Diddy could not, therefore, have left the train, could not have entered the tunnel, could not have killed him; but “Diddy knows the world is built on lies,” and all the passengers “can testify that the train stopped for about forty minutes”—or they could if we are to believe Diddy.
A corpse that may or may not be there is a rather explicit symbol of Susan’s sense of the unreality of the body, a refusal of the “thing-ness” that Thek’s work embraced. Diddy believes firmly in a crime the reader has every reason to believe he has not committed. Perhaps, as Freud postulated, that reality is less important than the reality of his conscience, whose guilt echoes another old fear of Susan’s: that she was fraudulent, inauthentic, unreal. To expiate this guilt, Diddy repeatedly tries, and fails, to be held to account, going so far as to visit Mrs. Incardona, who, in a druggy, nightmarish scene, makes a pass at him. But like Hippolyte, whose attempts at crime are continually thwarted, Diddy cannot convince anyone of his guilt. He wanders the city as Hester undergoes a doomed operation to restore her sight.
As in almost all of Sontag’s work, vision provides the dominant metaphor. Hester is blind; Diddy works for a manufacturer of microscopes. But seeing, for him, is the act of a depressive. “If you only knew how I suffer from my kind of seeing,” he says. “How it hurts to see everything . . . almost everything as ugly.”26 Hence his obsession with beauty, which he suspects might be a distraction from the true apprehension of things, and which partly explains his interest in Hester. Her way of seeing is so different from his that it almost becomes an ideal. Because he must see, he is tormented by the betrayals and uncertainties of vision.
In a dream, he appears at the hospital where Hester is being operated on and begins, “very carefully,” to photograph the operation.
She must be in pain. See how she’s turning restlessly on the table. The doctors continue. Diddy would like to do something, but he’s too far away. So he goes on photographing, his camera clicking. . . . Hester is the specimen beneath Diddy’s eye. Turning the knobs very slowly, he moves the tube up and down gradually, seeking the most accurate focus.27
This way of regarding the pain of others is also a way of using a device—a microscope, a camera—to distance that pain: to use technology to protect one’s eyes from unmediated seeing. Paradoxically, the camera could make such seeing even more painful, as Sontag observed in On Photography:
In a hospital in Shanghai in 1973, watching a factory worker with advanced ulcers have nine-tenths of his stomach removed under acupuncture anesthesia, I managed to follow the three-hour procedure (the first operation I’d ever observed) without queasiness, never once feeling the need to look away. In a movie theater in Paris a year later, the less gory operation in Antonioni’s China documentary Chung Kuo made me flinch at the first cut of the scalpel and avert my eyes several times during the sequence.28
What is the correct—the honest—way to see? Dispensing with the artificial device does not guarantee greater proximity to
reality, as Sontag learned in Shanghai, and as Diddy learns in the book. He banishes images, sight—and then, when that fails to get him nearer to whatever truth he is seeking—language:
Determined that nothing between him and Hester must be allowed to get mechanical and flat, Diddy seeks a means for reducing conversation without losing contact with the girl. Already lacking images, words cannot be sacrificed altogether. Only replaced.29
The replacement that they find is in the “thing-ness of the body.” There is the physical language that Hester has mastered, identifying things not by images or by language but by shape and feel. And there is their eyeless sex, “more and more, the unifying theme of their relationship.”30 But—as eyes reveal one truth only to occlude another—Diddy discovers good and bad blindness. The good way of not-seeing likewise thrusts them back into their alienated bodies:
Noble blindness. As in the Greek statues. Because they’re eyeless, these figures seem that much more alive, more centered in their bodies, more present. Making us, when we contemplate them, feel more present in ourselves.
Ignoble blindness: the blindness of impacted rage and despair. Something passive. As in the negative statuary of death. When someone drowns, the eyes are the first element of the body to disintegrate or rot; it’s through the vacant eye sockets of a freshly drowned corpse that eels swim.
It is appropriate that the first edition of Death Kit boasted a black cover. Oppression, darkness, blindness—being trapped in the tunnel—are the feelings the book conveys. If Sontag’s readers are exhausted by the time the book huffs and wheezes toward its unsatisfying end, that may be the point. Little in the novel turns out to be “real.” But that dark feeling surely is. It was exactly the feeling that descended on much of the world, and certainly on Susan, in the years of the Vietnam War.
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