* * *
In 1996, when Farrar, Straus celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, the Israeli writer David Grossman introduced himself. “Oh, Ms. Sontag, it is such a pleasure to meet you. I’m a great fan of your essays,” he said. “My essays?” she spat. “Juvenilia! Have you read Volcano?”26 Graciousness had never been her forte. Now, she began to speak disparagingly of her essayistic work, enthusiastically claiming the title of novelist.
“She began to speak of her own work as a critic and a woman of letters as entirely subordinate to her fiction,” her old friend Robert Boyers said.27 And as she had allowed her conflict with Annie to be visible to people far outside her immediate circle, she began attacking even friends in full public view, oblivious to the impression this made. At Skidmore College, where Boyers taught, she came to speak, an occasion for which he had prepared an extensive introduction.
When he finished, Susan stepped onto the podium: “Robert Boyers still doesn’t get it,” she sneered. “He still doesn’t get that I’m a novelist and that all this other writing he talked about is writing I did to keep writing and have something to do while I was developing myself as a fiction writer.” The attack was so blunt, so unmerited, that a chill went through an auditorium packed with three hundred appalled guests. Afterward, Peg Boyers marched up to Susan and said: “You must apologize to Bob immediately.” Susan did, “profusely,” like a chastened child—and like a child unsure what she had done wrong.
And in Amsterdam, where she came for the novel’s publication, she was onstage with the Dutch writer Abram de Swaan. A comment he made about Pirandello rubbed her the wrong way. “She went into a tirade that seemed endless,” said Annie Wright, a translator who was in the audience. “It did not stop. It went on and on and on and on—so extreme that it was discussed in the Dutch press, which was generally unflappable at the time.”28
* * *
The Volcano Lover found her cast in someone else’s psychodrama. In 1990, Camille Paglia resurfaced. In the twenty years since their brief encounter at Bennington, Paglia, flush with a success of her own, exploded with a “Homeric boast” directed at Susan: “I’ve been chasing that bitch for twenty-five years and at last I’ve passed her!”29 Paglia’s surprise bestseller, Sexual Personae, was published in 1990, two years before The Volcano Lover. Its subtitle, Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, gives an idea of its range and ambition; and Paglia’s boast shows that Sontag remained a central figure for many women intellectuals, and especially for younger lesbians. If Sontag had not had a lineage when she was a young woman, she had come to represent a lineage for the younger generation, who aspired to emulate her. “It should have been perfectly obvious in the nineties that I was indeed her successor in terms of media profile and flash for an American woman intellectual,” Paglia said.30
The tone of Paglia’s public taunting of Sontag was deliberate. Gaily comparing herself to Eve Harrington in All About Eve, Paglia hurled barbs that soon hit the tabloids. Proclaiming herself a “believer in pagan public spectacle” and in “trashy literary feuds,”31 she modeled her attack on Sontag on famous rivalries of the past.
I loved those feuds that had been going on with William F. Buckley versus Gore Vidal, threatening to punch him. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and Mary McCarthy versus Lillian Hellman. I thought that was fabulous. I love the tabloids and I thought it was fabulous to be attacking Sontag from a gossip column.32
This high camp did indeed hit the tabloids. MORE FROM SONTAG’S “NIGHTMARE,”33 the headline of Page Six, the gossip column of the New York Post, blared in August, when Camille called Susan “the ultimate symbol of bourgeois taste” and “an intellectual duchess” who was “defunct as an intellectual presence.”
Susan proclaimed that she had never so much as heard of Camille Paglia. An interviewer asked if she really had said “Who is Camille Paglia?”
“Excuse me,” she answered. “Are we not speaking English?”34
The same interviewer showed Paglia the clip, and Paglia tossed her head:
It’s as in The Turning Point with Anne Bancroft, I mean she is literally being passed, okay, by a younger rival. . . . She doesn’t watch TV, she’s not into rock, and she has been passed. . . . So she did me a tremendous favor. Nineteen ninety-two was a wonderful year for me because she came out of hiding and Germaine Greer came out of hiding and suddenly people realized just how interesting I am.
Later, Paglia regretted that Sontag had not participated in this campy performance. “It’s very entertaining to readers,” she said. It was: the Paglia-versus-Sontag feud was written about all over the world. “I think it’s good for women to have open combat the way men have always had open combat. I could have written Sontag’s lines! Against me. But she wasn’t playing the game—at all.”35
* * *
“Andy Warhol was my hero, I was a Warholite in college,” Paglia said. And in a Warholian way, not playing along was Susan’s way of playing along, her role enriching Paglia’s own. Who better to play “Miss Mandarin,” the “intellectual duchess,” than Susan Sontag? Susan’s snubs only encouraged Paglia, kept the story in the tabloids, and the ruckus strengthened Sontag’s reputation as a formidable diva.
She told Zoë Heller she was pretending she had never heard of Camille Paglia. “And the reason is I went to this party and I heard this guy say, ‘Gertrude Stein, who is that?’ and I loved that. So I’m using the same thing on Paglia.”36 But if Susan played along, this was, ultimately, Camille Paglia’s show. Only a few months later, Susan traveled to Sarajevo, and mounted a far more consequential performance of her own.
Part IV
Photograph by and courtesy of Paul Lowe.
Chapter 34
A Serious Person
When the Berlin Wall fell, even the flintiest cynic might have seen the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. The thrilling televised scenes of crowds tearing down walls and chasing off tyrants seemed to corroborate the old American belief—naïve or hopeful or both—that freedom was the destiny of all peoples, and that history could be conflated with progress. Communism collapsed, leading to the emergence of liberal governments across a huge swathe of the planet; in those years, too, most of the Latin American dictatorships crumbled; the Oslo Accords of 1993 promised peace between Israelis and Palestinians; and the release of Nelson Mandela announced the expiration of South African apartheid.
These changes were so dramatic that peace and democracy began to seem foreordained. It was easy to ridicule this notion, and Sontag often had. In “Project for a Trip to China,” she quoted a United States senator at the turn of the century who announced that “with God’s help, we shall raise Shanghai up and up and up until it reaches the level of Kansas City.”1 But for a few brief years, progress was real enough that even the most horrifying setbacks, such as the massacre in Tiananmen Square, seemed like temporary glitches. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published a book whose title became famous, so perfectly did it sum up the age: The End of History and the Last Man. History, which had rarely given much reason for optimism, had found its better self.
* * *
Sunny Yugoslavia topped the list of places that stood to gain from these revolutions. This land of islands, mountains, and forests had suffered less from communism than anywhere else in Communist Europe. In sharp contrast to other Communist citizens, who could only travel abroad with difficulty, Yugoslavs could freely come and go. The country was a dictatorship, but Tito never approached the full-fledged megalomania of Stalin or Ceaușescu; and though the economy was dysfunctional, it never approached the full-scale collapse of countries like Russia or Romania. With the end of communism, Yugoslavia, with its promising industries and highly educated people, its good infrastructure and its good wine, seemed ready to be seamlessly integrated into the West.
For the outside world, Yugoslavia was a nation and Yugoslavs were a people. That outside world, which had paid this place only the most occasional and absentminded heed, was little pr
epared for the complexities, “racial,” religious, and cultural, that characterized it. The largest ethnic group was the Serbs, for example, who were often coextensive with—but nonetheless distinct from—the Serbians, who are the citizens of Serbia, not all of whom are Serbs: they could be Albanians, Hungarians, Jews, or even Chinese. Serbs, in contrast, are an ethnic group of Eastern Orthodox Christians who may be found anywhere from Moscow to Miami; and there were furthermore Bosnian Serbs, Kosovo Serbs, and Croatian Serbs—by no means to be confused with the Serbian Croats—all of whom had their own histories, though all spoke the same language, which was generally known as Serbo-Croatian but which was also, depending on the place, called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, or simply, with a shrug, “our language.”
When the country began falling apart, this complexity made it easy to describe Yugoslavia as a medieval mystery, brewing with unfathomable hatreds; and this description was useful to foreign politicians seeking excuses for sitting on their hands. But there were other ways to describe Yugoslavia, the most obvious of which was as a modern European nation. It was true that it had a multiethnic populace, which also happened to be true of every nation based on citizenship rather than ethnicity. The Yugoslavs were people “for whom,” wrote David Rieff, “the ownership of seaside cottages, second cars, and university educations had become commonplace.”2 They were “as dependent on elevators, gas pipelines, supermarkets, and electricity as any other population of a modern, developed country.”
Perhaps, its dictatorship vanquished, Yugoslavia could have become a federation on the Swiss or Belgian model. Or perhaps, on the Czechoslovak model, its constituents might have peacefully gone their separate ways. That it did neither—that its name became a byword for horror—was largely thanks to one man, Slobodan Milošević, an apparatchik who rose to prominence in the 1980s by denouncing the abuses to which Serbs, the majority, were supposedly being subjected. Serbs were being oppressed by the Kosovar Albanians, the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, he declared—and moved, as president of Serbia, to centralize power in Belgrade. This provoked a reaction. Slovenia and Croatia seceded in early 1991. Slovenia’s independence was quickly assured; but fighting was fierce in Croatia, which bordered Serbia and was home to many Serbs. The Yugoslav army’s bombardment of Dubrovnik, the jewel of the Croatian Riviera, gave a taste of things to come.
These came the next year in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the most mixed of the republics. Its population, “divided” among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, was in practice so intermingled that many Bosnians believed that the kind of violence that had erupted so brutally in Croatia was impossible in Bosnia: to divide people by ethnic or religious background would mean destroying cities, neighborhoods, families. And that was exactly what happened after a referendum on Bosnian independence was boycotted by the Bosnian Serbs. War broke out on April 6, the day Bosnia received international recognition. On May 2, the rump of the Yugoslav army sealed off the Bosnian capital.
* * *
The word “capital” is a bit exalted for Sarajevo, which, in the exaggerated words of one Bosnian, is just one street. That street, parallel to the Miljacka River, is bisected by others, which, within a few blocks of the river, rise steeply into green hills, offering views of the gardens and minarets that gave the city a reputation for Islamic romance. It was also a place of European modernity: roughly equidistant from Milan and Istanbul, Vienna and Athens, Sarajevo had a cosmopolitan culture that lent it a far more sophisticated ambience than its size seemed to allow. With mosques and synagogues cheek by jowl, and Catholic and Orthodox churches side by side, Sarajevo represented the pluralistic ideal of which cities like New York were the heirs. There had been many of these cities in Central Europe; but most had been destroyed in the twentieth century by the irredentism that now threatened Sarajevo.
Like two hands cupped together, the valley that holds Sarajevo is deep, and narrows at both ends. Where the wrists touch, the valley squeezes into a thin pass; where the fingers meet, at the top of the valley, the terrain is just flat and wide enough to allow room for the strip of the airport runway. The city’s terrain had been a blessing for the tourism that Bosnia, like Croatia, hoped to attract. With ski lifts only a few minutes from downtown, Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. Then, few dreamed of the meaner uses to which this geography might be put.
Eight years later, Sarajevo was encircled. It would be choked off for 1,425 days, the longest siege in modern history. It lasted nearly twice as long as even the previous record holder, the Nazi siege of Leningrad. Those who could have ended it—the United States Navy determined this would have required at most forty-eight hours3—took refuge in clichés about the unplumbed intricacies and irreparable grievances of the Yugoslav tribes. The historical complexities were real, but once Sarajevo was surrounded the moral obligation became straightforward.
Milošević and his lieutenants placed the formerly mixed Yugoslav army at the service of a project to establish an ethnocracy in areas either heavily populated by Serbs or bearing some historical significance, no matter how fanciful, to them. The army and its countless spinoffs murdered, raped, and expelled Muslims and Croats from community after community in full view of a world that agreed on little but the one principle that, after Hitler, separated civilization from barbarism. This was a rejection of “ethnic cleansing,” a phrase the Yugoslav slaughter contributed to the world’s lexicon. Everyone agreed that the phenomenon of racial terror ought to be in the past; but without outside intervention such agreement was empty. Supposedly civilized nations kept calm and carried on as concentration camps were established and civilians were bombed and starved less than an hour from Venice.
“It was amazing,” said Atka Kafedzić Reid, a young Bosnian woman, “how you could go, in one day, from watching MTV to a completely medieval existence.”4 The Olympic city became a place where the gift of an onion was an extravagant token of altruism; where birds, frightened by the constant shelling, had fled the city; where people carried their own feces in paper bags in search of somewhere to dispose of them; and where citizens no longer noticed the dead bodies they stepped over in the street. “A European city was being reduced to nothing,” wrote David Rieff. “Carthage in slow motion, but this time with an audience and a videotaped record.”5
* * *
David went to Bosnia in September 1992, at the end of the first summer of siege. As for so many of the journalists who stayed in Sarajevo, the journey became a continental divide. “In a previous life, the life before Bosnia, I used to flatter myself that indignation was an emotion to which I was virtually immune,” he wrote.6 Like so many of the journalists who made the journey to Sarajevo, he did so because he believed, however implicitly, in the existence of a civilized world, and in the duty to inform it. “If the news about Bosnia could just be brought home to people,” he thought, “the slaughter would not be allowed to continue.”7
At the end of that first visit, he spoke to Miro Purivatra, who later founded the Sarajevo Film Festival, and asked if there was anything, or anyone, he could bring back. “One of the persons who could be perfect to come here to understand what’s going on would definitely be Susan Sontag,” he said. Without mentioning the connection—“for sure,” Miro said, “I did not know that he was her son”—David said he would do what he could. He appeared at Miro’s door a few weeks later. “We hugged each other and he told me, ‘Okay, you asked me something and I brought your guest here.’ Just behind the door, it was her. Susan Sontag. I was frozen.” It would be at least a month before he figured out their relationship: “They never told me.”8 This was in April 1993, the first of what would turn out to be Susan’s eleven visits to a place that became so important to her life that a prominent downtown square is named for her—so important that David would consider burying her there.
As Sarajevo was situated at the intersection between Islam and Christianity, and between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, it was the place where the interests that Sontag had pursued
throughout her life coincided. The political role, and the social duty, of the artist; the attempt to unite the aesthetic with the political, and her understanding that the aesthetic was political; the link between mind and body; the experience of power and powerlessness; the ways pain is inflicted, regarded, and represented; the ways images, language, and metaphor create—and distort—whatever people call reality: these questions were refracted, and then literally dramatized, during the nearly three years she spent coming and going from the worst place in the world.
* * *
“I didn’t not come before because I was afraid, I didn’t not come because I wasn’t interested,” Susan said on that first visit. “I didn’t come before because I didn’t know what’s the use of it.”9 But once she left, she could not get the city out of her mind. The contrast between what she had seen and the cool indifference of the world outside was too jarring.
To leave Sarajevo and be, an hour later, in a “normal” city (Zagreb). To get into a taxi (a taxi!) at the airport . . . to ride in traffic regulated by traffic signals, along streets lined with buildings that have intact roofs, unshelled walls, glass in the windows . . . to flip on the light switch in your hotel room . . . to use a toilet and flush it afterward . . . to run the bath (you haven’t had a bath in several weeks) and have water, hot water, come out of the tap . . . to take a stroll and see shops, and people walking, like you, at a normal pace . . . to buy something in a small grocery store with fully stocked shelves . . . to enter a restaurant and be given a menu . . .10
Safely in Berlin, she found herself “totally obsessed,” writing a German friend that “to go to Sarajevo now is a bit like what it must have been to visit the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1942.”11 The comparison to the Holocaust was not made flippantly—and, when the massacres, concentration camps, and “ethnic cleansing” came to light, would become commonplace. But Susan was the first to make it, after that first visit, in an interview with German television. “She was the first international person who said publicly that what is happening in Bosnia in 1993 was a genocide,” said Haris Pašović, a young theater director. “The first. She deeply understood this. She was absolutely one hundred percent dedicated to this because she thought it was important for Bosnia but it was also important for the world.”12
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