Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  In the postideological age, this was a Cultural Event: famous names entertaining the lawyers and professors and bankers who could be expected to show up for a play directed by Susan Sontag at Harvard. There was nothing wrong with this kind of culture. But it was a poor cousin of culture as Sontag always understood the word. Great art lent such meaning and dignity to life that it was literally worth dying for—as she had been willing to give her life for Stravinsky as an adolescent, as she had always, as an adult, admired most those artists who understood art as a bullfight.

  To this culture she had pledged her life. For decades, Sontag was forced to see its centrality questioned, its values eroded. “The undermining of standards of seriousness is almost complete,” she wrote in 1996, “with the ascendancy of a culture whose most intelligible, persuasive values are drawn from the entertainment industries.”13 Around that time, she mentioned to Miranda Spieler, her assistant, that during the Columbia University uprising of 1968, one of the leaders published a letter that ended with the phrase “Up against the wall, motherfuckers.” Susan wryly remarked: “I hadn’t realized that we were going in this direction.”14

  And the direction was less toward revolt than toward money. It was one thing to offer one’s life for Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Mozart, and something else to offer it for Andy Warhol. The consumerist vision demanded nothing, and certainly not sacrifice. This may have been the difference between culture and Cultural Event: at a Cultural Event, there was not the slightest risk of being gored.

  Modernism had called art’s social function into question. But this was not in order to see it replaced with price tags. So much modern art—from the silent compositions of John Cage to the installations of Paul Thek to the happenings of Allan Kaprow—manifested a desire to place itself beyond buying and selling. These artists sought another justification: Sontag cited Artaud’s demand “that art justify itself by the standards of moral seriousness.”15 But the question of what those standards ought to be was maddeningly hard, and Artaud himself had not found a use for art: his view, she wrote in that essay, “makes a work of art literally useless in itself.”16 Ditto for the writer’s social and political role:

  The modern authors can be recognized by their effort to disestablish themselves, by their will not to be morally useful to the community, by their inclination to present themselves not as social critics but as seers, spiritual adventurers, and social pariahs.17

  Yet Sontag found a different, less obvious usefulness in Artaud’s postulation of “a psychological materialism: the absolute mind is also absolutely carnal.”18 His “writings on the theater may be read as a psychological manual on the reunification of mind and body. Theater became his supreme metaphor for the self-correcting, spontaneous, carnal, intelligent life of the mind.”19 This reunification would not be fun. “His theater would have nothing to do with the aim of providing ‘pointless, artificial diversion,’” she wrote. “Only the most passionate of moralists would have wanted people to attend the theater as they visit the surgeon or the dentist.”20 This was “art as an ordeal.” And while it might hasten “a swift, wholly unified consciousness”21 and even “heal the split between language and flesh,”22 it could also get you killed.

  * * *

  Susan returned to Sarajevo on July 19, 1993, to direct Waiting for Godot. This performance was produced without so much as electricity, and without costumes worthy of the name, and with a set made of nothing more than the plastic sheets the United Nations distributed to cover windows shot out by sniper fire.23 Yet this production became a cultural event in the highest sense of the term, an event that showed what modernist culture had been—and what, in extraordinary circumstances, it might yet be.

  “Nowhere had the risk been so great, for what is involved this time, without ambiguity, is what is essential,” Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote in February 1953, less than a month after the debut of Godot. “Nowhere, moreover, have the means employed been so poor.”24 He was referring to Beckett’s own means: a set that consisted of a scrawny tree and a trash can; a strictly minimal language; a threadbare cast of beggars—one deprived of sight, another of speech—waiting for a salvation, a climax, that never comes.

  In Paris, in 1953, these were artistic choices: metaphors. In Sarajevo, forty years later, they were daily reality. “They saw people being happy and suffering,” wrote the play’s first reviewer, “and did not understand that they were watching their own lives.”25 This misunderstanding did not burden the Sarajevans. At the casting, Susan asked the actors whether there was a connection between their lives and Beckett’s piece. Admir Glamočak, who would be cast as the ironically named Lucky, answered:

  I would act Lucky in such a way to portray Sarajevo, portray this city. Lucky is a victim. And Sarajevo was a victim. I was maybe ten kilos less than now, so I didn’t need any makeup and I just had to reveal a little bit of my body so you could see the bones and something that was supposed to be muscle. And everything that Lucky says that makes no sense was actually the voice of any person in Sarajevo.26

  Izudin Bajrović thought the choice of the play was obvious:

  We really were waiting for someone to come and to free us from this evil. We thought that would be a humane act. A decent act. To free us from this suffering. But nobody came to help us. We waited in vain. We waited for someone to say: this doesn’t make sense, for these innocent people to be killed like this. We were waiting. We actually lived Waiting for Godot.27

  * * *

  Susan stayed at the Holiday Inn, a cheerful yellow building whose name associated it with middle-class vacations in unperturbed destinations. Now, a scant decade after being built for the 1984 Olympics, it found itself stranded at the end of a wide avenue officially called Zmaja od Bosne but notorious all over the world as Sniper Alley. This was the main road from the airport into the city center, and its many high-rise buildings stared straight out at the Serb positions in the nearby hills.

  From the airport, one reached the Holiday Inn in a United Nations armored vehicle or, failing that, by car: to avoid getting shot, the trick was reclining the driver’s seat as flat as it would go, lying nearly supine, and speeding down the avenue as fast as possible. On the short distance between the airport and the Holiday Inn, people could be killed, and often were.

  The hotel itself was a large rectangle surrounding a tall covered courtyard. The side facing the Serb positions had been shelled, but the far side was still largely safe. There, most foreign reporters were lodged. “One of the hotel staff said the place hadn’t been this full since the 1984 Winter Olympics,” Susan wrote.28 The staff went to great lengths to keep up appearances, but their smart uniforms became increasingly ragged, and they cooked whatever food they had on an open fire on the kitchen floor.

  By siege standards, the Holiday Inn was a place of luxury: there was food, in the form of the starchy rolls served at breakfast. In the blockaded city, even these were something of a miracle, and nobody was quite sure how the staff managed to find them. One actor, Izudin Bajrović, remembered what this food meant to Susan’s starving cast.

  For some reason, from somewhere, she would bring us rolls that she would gather at the breakfast table. And we ate those rolls and it was wonderful. Now, when you eat a sandwich at work, it’s not a big event. But at the time, when she brought those rolls, it was a very significant thing.29

  Ferida Duraković recalled Susan’s oblique ways of showing affection. “She was not a soft person,” she said. “You had to be very careful talking with her and being in her company.” Instead, she showed a more discreet solidarity:

  At that time, she was smoking a lot and she was very nervous and she smoked like half a cigarette and then put it out in the ashtray. Suddenly, on the third or fourth day, I saw the actors waiting for her to put the butt out because it was half of a cigarette. After a break of fifteen minutes, they would go back to the ashtray. One morning she realized what she was doing and never did it again. She either smoked it to the end or she
left a box of cigarettes just next to the ashtray, like she forgot her cigarettes. That was the way not to humiliate the actors.30

  Senada Kreso, an Information Ministry official responsible for helping foreign visitors, remembered another gesture, unforgettable because it meant being seen not as a wretched victim but as a normal woman. Whereas many foreign visitors would come with food, Susan appeared with “a huge bottle of Chanel No. 5” as a gift for Senada. “That marked the beginning of my utmost admiration for the woman, not just the author.”31

  And Bajrović never forgot her kindness.

  On August 18, my daughter’s first birthday, Susan came to the rehearsal with a watermelon. For us—I can’t describe. It was incredible. I couldn’t believe it. And when she found out that it’s my daughter’s birthday she gave me half of the entire watermelon. It was beyond the lottery. As if someone would give you now a brand-new Mercedes. Even more! When I came home with half a watermelon, nobody believed they were seeing right.32

  One of the most touching items in Sontag’s archives is a drawing of a green-and-white striped watermelon. Above it, in a childish hand: “Susan is our big water-melon!”33

  * * *

  “I’m looking for my dignity. Don’t laugh,” Susan had written in her journal in 1971. The line would have rung true in Sarajevo, too, for people who, she said, had “to spend a good part of each day seeing to it that their toilets flush, so that their bathrooms don’t become cesspools.”34 For Sarajevo as for Susan Sontag, culture was the best way to overcome humiliation and fear. “I do go to fetch water,” said Ines Fančović, an older star of the Sarajevo stage, who played Pozzo.

  But it would be horrible if I were to think of myself as a water-fetcher. When I am working in the theater I forget about all else. I forget I need to carry up to thirty or fifty liters of water daily, forget I’m afraid of shells, that I’m so very afraid of shells.35

  Throughout the hot, hungry summer of 1993, Sontag and her actors worked ten hours a day. The original Paris production—directed, not coincidentally, by a friend of Artaud’s, Roger Blin—had basic scenography, and so did the Sarajevo production: not because of an artistic choice, but because there was no alternative.

  We played by candlelight [said Glamočak]. We had two little spotlights that were hooked to a generator. Sometimes we wouldn’t have fuel for the generator. So then we would bring more candles, but then we would run out of candles. Then we made our own oil lamps. So that Beckett’s world was perfectly placed in the here and now.

  That here and now revealed difficulties that Beckett could not have anticipated. Some obstacles were technical: “Lacking the normal peripheral vision that anybody has in daylight or when there is electric light,” she wrote, “they could not do something as simple as put on or take off their bowler hats in unison.”36 Some were nutritional: despite her efforts to keep the troupe fed, the actors were so undernourished that they would instantly lie down as soon as there was a break. “Another symptom of fatigue: they were slower to memorize their lines than any actors I have ever worked with.”

  “Distraction, and fear” also made them forget their lines,37 and their fear was not abstract. The degree of danger varied, but could never be put out of mind. One day, Sarajevo was hit by nearly four thousand shells; another day, July 30, only one fell: enough to kill Vlajko Šparavalo, a well-known Shakespearean actor. When the news reached the rehearsal room, Bajrović said,

  Susan came and asked if we’re up to working today. I was the only one who said I don’t think we should do it today. Everyone else said yes we should. And Susan agreed. Now, maybe I was pathetic that day. Maybe they were right. Every day someone was dying here.38

  The actors were filled with the import of their work. In no place but Sarajevo was such Artaudian drama possible, if “Artaudian” is taken to mean “the world of plague victims which Artaud invokes as the true subject of modern dramaturgy.”39 Velibor Topić, who played Estragon, gave an idea of what, in that context, acting now meant.

  You couldn’t fool the audience. You don’t know if you’re going to be alive in five minutes or ten or the next day. So you can’t fool them. You have to give them your honest acting abilities because you just don’t know if you can do another play the next day. I’ve played in front of wounded people, I’ve played in front of blind children, in the hospital, on the second floor, while people were having their legs cut off on the ground floor, people who were literally losing their lives, screaming, while I was playing.40

  * * *

  Against this background, the play took shape. Susan made significant changes to the text. The tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, became three different couples: a man and a man, a woman and a woman, and a man and a woman. This created another obstacle, making the play excessively long; and so Susan decided, seven days before the premiere, to cut the second act. “The second act would remain in the heads of the audience, as well as in the heads of all of us,” Glamočak remembered her explaining. “Perhaps in the second act we could have simply sat down with the audience and waited with them, who’s going to do what, what’s going to happen now.”

  There were practical reasons for the abridgment: “How could I ask the audience, which would have no lobby, bathroom, or water, to sit so uncomfortably, without moving, for two and a half hours?”41 And there were symbolic ones:

  Perhaps I felt that the despair of Act I was enough for the Sarajevo audience, and I wanted to spare them a second time when Godot does not arrive. . . . For, precisely as Waiting for Godot was so apt an illustration of the feelings of Sarajevans now—bereft, hungry, dejected, waiting for an arbitrary, alien power to save them or take them under its protection—it seemed apt, too, to be staging Waiting for Godot, Act I.42

  The production was acclaimed in Sarajevo, said Glamočak.

  She made a fantastic performance. Because she managed to create a performance that is happening here and now with somebody else’s text, written so many years before we actually played it.43

  The symbolism was important, received, Senada Kreso said, “as the story of our lives.” Those who saw it never forgot it, said Ademir Kenović, a producer who, miraculously, continued making films throughout the war, including of Godot.

  It was giving hope, and when something is strong, in war it is a hundred times stronger. When something is good, it’s a hundred times good. The psychological importance was HUGE. Susan Sontag is telling the world about what is happening here! So it’s much bigger than you can imagine.44

  * * *

  If the play made a powerful impact on those who saw it, it was also important for those who did not: for those for whom Bosnia was a distant, inscrutable conflict. With what may have sounded like false modesty, Susan wrote that she was “surprised by the amount of attention from the international press that Godot was getting.”45 She had often been accused of publicity-hounding, and so it was in Bosnia: the Irish journalist Kevin Myers wrote, in one especially cretinous example, that his “real mistake was not radioing her co-ordinates to the Serb artillery, reporting that they marked the location of Bosnian heavy armour.”46

  Yet she was right to be surprised. Only a few years before Internet use became universal, getting news out of the besieged city presented an almost insurmountable challenge. Any means of communication that depended on electricity—radio, telephones, telegraphs, television—had almost entirely ceased to exist. To file reports for the New York Times, John Burns resorted to a special military radio in the Presidency Building, where he dictated stories to a policeman in a town outside Sarajevo—a policeman who barely spoke English—who would then dispatch the stories to Split, in Croatia, and thence, by computer, to New York.47

  The Bosnians were perfectly aware of the difficulties, and were not naïve about what would happen even if word did get out. But they were still hopeful, Izudin Bajrović said:

  We were hoping that this project would open the eyes of the world. And they will see what is happening to us and they will react. A
nd we were hoping that Susan Sontag was powerful enough to move things. Our expectations were high, obviously. But we didn’t even have the feedback whether the world has heard of this.48

  When they learned how much publicity the production garnered, the besieged Sarajevans were thrilled. “The front page of the Washington Post: ‘Waiting for Clinton,’ ‘Waiting for Intervention,’” said Pašović. “For us this was a very big victory—the New York Times and everybody wrote about it.”49 This was a recognition of the dignity that culture conferred. “We hoped that people in the outside world would learn about us,” said the poet Goran Simić. “People in the West had the impression that we were quite uncivilized people.”50

  Susan was frustrated by the indifference of her powerful friends, but two did show up, and generated publicity of their own. In France, Nicole Stéphane had been making the rounds. Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint-Laurent’s partner, was on holiday when the phone rang: “Susan is in Sarajevo and she wants to put on Waiting for Godot,” Nicole said, “but she needs money. Can something be done?”51 Bergé immediately agreed, and soon enough, Susan wrote,

  Nicole surprised me by turning up in the besieged city (not an easy thing to do!) to direct herself, with only a cinematographer and a sound-man, a documentary centring on the production I was rehearsing with local actors in a bombed-out theatre of En attendant Godot. . . . Nicole was, as usual, fearless and enthusiastic—just as she must have been as the adolescent volunteer in the Free French Forces in London who participated in the Liberation of Paris.52

  Miro Purivatra, who had asked David to bring Susan Sontag without suspecting that she was his mother, was in for yet another surprise. At the end of her first visit, Susan wondered if there was anything or anyone she could bring back, and he mentioned—without the foggiest notion of their connection—a famous photographer. “Maybe she could do some pictures here,” he said.

  Then maybe five months later Susan Sontag is knocking on the door. “Hi, Miro. I have the guest you asked me to bring.” She brought Annie Leibovitz.53