Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  From the mid-1970s, when she met Brodsky and the émigrés around him, she had been close to writers who had suffered under communism, though it took Brodsky’s fulminant insistence on the reality of their experience to make her “an intelligent person again.” But even before that, on her many visits to the Communist world, she had plenty of occasions to see what real communism meant. On their visit to Cuba in 1968, Robert Silvers met a poet named Heberto Padilla, who described the worsening human rights situation and who, in March 1971, was detained and tortured. Upon release, he issued an Autocrítica reminiscent of a Stalinist show trial: “‘I’ve been a CIA agent since I was five,’ or something like that,” said Silvers. “And [the Cuban authorities] were so stupid they actually published it.”26

  The persecution of Padilla took the shine off the Revolution for many international supporters. Susan joined the flower of the Latin American and European intelligentsia—Sartre, Beauvoir, Moravia, Cortázar, Paz, Rulfo, Vargas Llosa, and many more—in denouncing the proceedings. She signed two different letters, first in Le Monde, then in the New York Times. Soon, however, she began to backpedal. At a meeting in which one speaker denounced Padilla’s “elitism and his willingness to cultivate a small literary clique that held itself aloof from the people,” she “strongly regretted” signing them. She had only done so because “she had been told it would be a private letter” to Fidel Castro, having “no idea that such a missive would become front-page news in the New York Times.”27 This, though she signed the Times letter after the first “private” letter had already appeared in Le Monde.

  But like many of Susan’s political missteps, this one would be redeemed. Almost a decade later, Silvers got a call from Padilla’s wife, who had escaped Cuba in 1979. She begged for his help in getting Heberto out, and in response Silvers invited Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the Kennedy family consigliere, to lunch. Silvers explained the situation, which Schlesinger correctly interpreted as a request to appeal to Ted Kennedy. A week later, a call came from the senator’s office: Padilla would be arriving, through Canada, at LaGuardia Airport. His arrival was a relief, but also a problem. Press conference over, “the Kennedy guy gave him a thousand bucks and he had proper visitor status,” said Silvers. “But what could he do? Where could he live?”

  The answer was with Susan Sontag. “Susan, without making any fuss about it, simply said, ‘Come and stay here.’” Padilla ended up staying with her for six months, said Silvers. “I thought it was one of the most selfless and even noble acts on Susan’s part.”28

  * * *

  It was a gesture she would often repeat, as she did after a visit to Poland in 1980. She went with a group including Joyce Carol Oates and John Ashbery, and met a young Polish writer named Jarosław Anders. She dazzled him. “The way she expressed her views, opinions, with authority, with boldness, with recklessness sometimes, without any caveats. I found it very, very interesting and revealing, and liberating, personally. This was a free mind.” He found her well prepared to understand the Polish situation. “She already knew Brodsky and Miłosz and they influenced her thinking,” he remembered. “She was not the Susan from ‘Trip to Hanoi.’”29

  She arranged for Anders to visit the United States. At the end of 1981, he did, staying at Susan’s apartment on Seventeenth Street. On the morning of December 13, she woke him up and showed him the headline in the Times: MARTIAL LAW DECLARED IN POLAND. This action, extreme even by the standards of the Soviet bloc, came in the wake of Karol Wojtyła’s election, at the end of 1978, as Pope John Paul II. Susan visited in April 1980; in September, the trade union Solidarity emerged among workers in the Gdańsk shipyard. With the founding of Solidarity, the opposition of the church to which almost all Poles were loyal joined the opposition of the working class, in whose name the Communists claimed to rule.

  Anders lost his job, and could not communicate with his wife and young daughter. Susan supported him throughout. “My situation was paradoxical because it was not a very typical immigrant experience, when you are an intellectual and you have to drive a taxi,” he said. With Susan’s patronage, he became a fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, and “started writing in English, my acquired language, on the pages of The New York Review of Books.” In February 1982, a meeting was called at Town Hall to express the support of left-wing intellectuals for Solidarity.

  “In atmosphere,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “right down to the faulty film-projector, the overcrowded podium and the bearded chairman, it was clearly an evening of the Left.”30 In the age of Reagan, the Left was demoralized and defensive, though it kept to its old formalities, including a tendency to equate anything bad in the Communist with something bad in the capitalist world. This annoyed Brodsky, whom the peace activist Ralph Schoenman addressed:

  “You were invited to speak because we value your help to Polish writers, but no one has to answer to your misplaced self-righteousness. When we support Solidarity we are defending socialism from those who debase it. We have no intention of allowing the likes of Reagan to beat the drums for Polish workers.”

  “Why not?” asked Brodsky. “What’s wrong with US government support for the Polish people?”

  “Reagan and Haig’s propaganda venture,” [Schoenman replied], “included Bulend [sic] Ulusu, the prime minister of Turkey, who not only imposed martial law in his country—and at US behest—but has trade unionists under sentence of execution and thousands imprisoned without trial. If that’s the company you wish to keep, we don’t.”31

  Encouraged by Brodsky, Susan stood.

  Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

  After accusing an audience that included Gore Vidal, Allen Ginsberg, E. L. Doctorow, Pete Seeger, and Kurt Vonnegut (who sang a Polish song to the tune of “Are You from Dixie?”) of being dumber than Reader’s Digest, she twisted the knife.

  Communism is Fascism—successful Fascism, if you will. What we have called Fascism is, rather, the form of tyranny that can be overthrown—that has, largely, failed.

  I repeat: not only is Fascism (and overt military rule) the probable destiny of all Communist societies—especially when their populations are moved to revolt—but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of Fascism. Fascism with a human face.32

  There were catcalls and jeers; the weeks following elicited page after page of Family “responses”: David responded to one, by Richard Grenier in The New Republic, by challenging the author to a duel.33

  Her final salvo gave rise to quips: “I, for one, should hate to see Sontag, long one of the most valued assets of the American left, allow herself to become caricatured as Norman Podhoretz with a human face,” wrote the editor Philip Pochoda.34 (Podhoretz had abandoned the Left and become an outspoken supporter of Reagan.) Sir Isaiah Berlin weighed in with the iciest line of all: “I agree,” he told Susan. “But I’m not so sure about the face.”35

  * * *

  “She was attacked from both sides,” said Anders. “I was with her. She was very, very upset about that. It hurt her, it hurt her personally.” But the attacks had more to do with Susan’s tone than anything else. The relationship of communism to fascism had, after all, been debated, often by the same people in the room, since the 1930s. People—again including many of the people in the room—had tried for years to make her understand the truth about communism, and how it was different from the democratic socialist aspirations they cherished. “She was sentimental about communism,” said Eva Kollisch, a former Trotskyite, “at a time when communism was torturing, killing, starving people.”36 Bob Silvers said:

  She was not a person who had a consistent view of anything, but was constantly reinventing herself, and in relation to those different women [her lovers], and
in relation to communism, and America, and Heberto [Padilla] . . . and then she did this book about an actress, you see, who impersonates [In America, published in 1999].37

  And friends were annoyed by Susan’s old tendency to project her own failings onto others. This was the characteristic Edmund White described in his roman à clef:

  Mathilda appeared to waste a lot of time pondering the moral aspects of other people’s actions. Since her theoretical resourcefulness was joined to a powerful but naive egotism, her moral researches always ended with a conviction of her enemies, an exoneration of her friends and a sort of ethical perfect attendance pin for herself.38

  She had always projected herself onto others. But in the wake of her cancer, the hesitations visible in the Padilla case or in “Trip to Hanoi” had disappeared. Belief in the image she had created—of the woman who listened to nobody, who was always right—was an increasingly vital lie. She would soon be denying Communist affinities with as much vim as she had used to announce that she was “quite unseduced” by the myths surrounding illness. It was the same pose that always got her in trouble: nobody, at least in her world, had forgotten her pro-Communist bluster. “In 1982, the sixties were yesterday,” said Leon Wieseltier, a new friend, David’s age, who was horrified by her performance at Town Hall.39

  Yet by 1982, only four years before Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, the number of people interested in debates about communism had dwindled to almost zero; the entire dustup played out among “a small literary clique that held itself aloof from the people.” Phillip Lopate noticed this when he saw her in Houston shortly thereafter. There, it had never occurred to anyone to be a Stalinist, Trotskyite, Leninist, or Marxist-Leninist.

  She expected to be heckled for her provocative political stance, and she even referred to that controversy in her opening remarks, but of course no one in Houston knew what she was talking about. . . . If anything, Houston high society—those who went to the opera, the ballet, museum openings, and our Reading Series—was obsessed with the British royals. A visit from Princess Margaret had generated far more excitement than any Left-sectarian debate ever could.40

  Chapter 27

  Things That Go Right

  The Town Hall mêlée involved categories and ideas that would soon be antiquated. But it had a salutary consequence. As in the cultural field—where changing times released Susan from an obligation to works that, she later admitted, she never liked anyway—her break with radicalism freed her from orthodoxies that were increasingly irrelevant to late-twentieth-century politics. She did not become a neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz with a human face. Instead, she became a liberal, that scourge of radicals, right and left. For the rest of her life, she championed causes that were not revolutionary but were nonetheless urgent. These included freedom of speech and opposition to racial, sexual, and religious bigotry—causes that needed the advocacy she could bring. In a world shifting sharply rightward, abandoning radicalism would not mean abandoning controversy.

  As her writing gained authority when she avoided hidebound certainty, her political influence grew with her embrace of liberalism, the political expression of uncertainty: the attempt to accommodate multiple views rather than to impose a single standpoint. Her radicalism became passé, but her liberal activism formed one of her enduring legacies: an argument for culture as a bulwark against barbarism, for the connection between art and the political values that guaranteed individual dignity.

  If she was writing less, her activism became a work of its own, putting the lie to the idea that liberalism represented a moderate center. Its traditions, artistic and political, were under siege: at home, both Reaganite consumerism and the jargon of Theory were, in different ways, undermining high culture. Abroad, they were attacked by fanatics from Khomeini to Milošević. Sontag argued for the centrality of culture with a conviction that rallied people all around the world, and became genuinely countercultural in a way she never was in the sixties.

  * * *

  This would be much of Susan’s life in the eighties, though she resisted dividing time into decades, or even centuries: a shorthand, she wrote, that concealed a peculiarly modern historical discourse. This idea began around 1800, when people began wondering what separated the nineteenth century from the eighteenth. At a speech in 1981, she read from Balzac’s Beatrix and enumerated the characteristics of the nineteenth century:

  (a) a tendency to think in terms of travel, (b) a tendency to think in terms of observing rather than participating, (c) the past as an image, (d) the age produces products rather than works, (e) each age must be superseded, like parents by their children. There developed our peculiar modern ambivalence: progress is natural and desired, and yet it creates a pathos for the past, pathos for the notion that we have lost a more innocent age.1

  This pathos characterizes one of Susan’s most elegiac stories, “Unguided Tour,” which closed I, etcetera, and which she had written in 1974, shortly before she fell ill. Sometimes its short paragraphs consist of a single word (“Right,” “Pollution”); sometimes of quick touristy phrases (“Monsieur René says it closes at five”); sometimes of the lists that were a Sontag specialty:

  I think it’s safe to. Pick up hitchhikers, drink unbottled water, try to score some hash in the piazza, eat the mussels, leave the camera in the car, hang out in waterfront bars, trust the hotel concierge to make the reservation, don’t you?

  But among the banality of these bourgeois tourists is a recognition of the pain of traveling among beautiful things that, like the self, are ever on the verge of disintegration and loss.

  They’re still there.

  Ah, but they won’t be there for long.

  I know. That’s why I went. To say goodbye. Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.

  Knowledge of the world’s beauty brings awareness of its fragility, awareness of how much we stand to lose: travel is “just one of the more disastrous forms of unrequited love.” And to grow older amid objects from the past, to travel after years of having traveled, is to know that even the most beautiful places are no match for the restless self: “Prisons and hospitals are swollen with hope. But not charter flights and luxury hotels.” Yet even in this world of ever-closing doors, “sometimes you were happy. Not just in spite of things.”2

  A few years after this story was published in The New Yorker, in 1977, it would bring her another form of happiness. Through Carlotta’s friend Giovannella Zannoni, Susan was invited to Venice to film “Unguided Tour” for Italian television. The production, with Zannoni’s help, was cobbled together quickly, but Susan needed an actress who could play the part of a woman traveling to say good-bye: in this case, an American woman separating from an Italian lover. The solution came from the director Robert Wilson, in Paris at the time, who suggested Susan approach the dancer and choreographer Lucinda Childs.

  Wilson had clearly seen how compatible, artistically speaking, Lucinda and Susan would prove. He also suspected that they would be compatible in other ways: Lucinda was beautiful, and as soon as she turned up in Venice, she and Susan fell in love, her most intense passion since her relationship with Carlotta ended more than a decade before. Their honeymoon, as in all of Susan’s relationships, was short. But—as in all of Susan’s relationships—they would be involved, in one way or another, for the rest of their lives.

  Their love affair was disguised by the on-screen affair between Lucinda and the Italian actor Claudio Cassinelli. The film reproduces several themes in the story, including the bits of background inescapable in Venice: the polyglot chitchat, the oars splashing in canals, the pigeons strutting around San Marco. The film concentrates not on plot or character but on ritualized movement, and resembles a dance or a photographic essay more than a traditional narrative. It was boring in the way that Susan admired (“Maybe art has to be boring, now”): a single shot of the pigeons lasted three full minutes. This is perhaps a nod toward Joseph Cornell, whose shorts Nymphlight, made in 1957, and The Aviary, from
1955, share many characteristics of Unguided Tour: silence, repeated movement, monumental architecture—and a magnificent woman wandering through a landscape full of pigeons.

  The film could have benefited from a less heavy-handed deployment of Venetian morbidity: the “capital of melancholy” is gray, dripping, bursting with monuments to eminent cadavers. The couple walks past the palace where Wagner expired; Childs lays a wreath on the tomb of Diaghilev, a few feet from where Joseph Brodsky would soon be laid to rest. But the film springs to life when the camera lingers on “the woman of culture” who is the film’s real subject: Lucinda. As she dances, admires churches, walks over and glides under bridges, the director’s love for her lends the film a romantic élan that documents a moment in both women’s lives: when they were happy, not just in spite of things.

  * * *

  Robert Wilson had created one of the seminal works of the 1970s, Einstein on the Beach. Five intermissionless hours long, the opera, with music by Philip Glass, was descended in part from earlier modernist works like Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, in which the dramatic elements of classical opera, including narrative, would be replaced by sound, movement, and allusion: an idea related to the technique Susan had used in much of her fiction, in which experience would not be molded into clean forms but would be allowed to remain, as in the works of the surrealists or Joseph Cornell, fragmentary. Einstein was an “against interpretation” opera. Its ebb and flow attempted to suggest life as it is actually lived—the world coming into and then retreating from focus—undermining the modern idea of linear, progressive time that Susan had always resisted: the idea that Einstein did more than anyone to explode. Typical of the production was the freedom it left the audience to wander in and out of the theater.