Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  As soon as she arrived, Annie began making expressive Photograph, including of the maternity ward at Koševo Hospital, where mothers were giving birth without anesthesia; and of the heroic journalists of the Oslobođenje newspaper, working to bring the news a stone’s throw from the front line. Perhaps her most famous image was of a child’s toppled bicycle beside a stain—a half circle, as in a Zen ensō painting—of blood. There was nothing airbrushed or removed about this kind of photography, as she remembered:

  We chanced upon it as we were driving along. A mortar went off and three people were killed, including the boy on the bicycle. He was put in the back of our car and died on the way to hospital.54

  “Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention,” Sontag had written in On Photography.55 Now, she saw how essential images were to the Bosnian cause. Published in Vanity Fair, they brought the war to the attention of millions who would not have read David Rieff in The Nation or John Burns in the Times. In the pages of the magazine, Annie’s work produced some odd conjunctions—“Here was suddenly Sarajevo next to Brad Pitt”—and in her own life. After photographing the murdered boy, she headed home: “I had to remember which side to shoot Barbra Streisand’s face from.”56

  * * *

  Sontag’s Godot answered many of the essential questions about the usefulness of modern art. It did not save the boy on the bike, or usher in military intervention, or summon the great quaquaquaqua. But she found a way to offer everything she had, following Vladimir’s exhortation in act 2:

  Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!57

  If a condition of the modern artist—of the modern person—is awareness that Godot will not be turning up, that does not mean that that person is not needed, cannot make some difference. Sontag’s determination to make that difference made her exceptional. “She was not seen as unique,” said Kenović. “She was unique.”58 After her death, the plaza in front of Bosnia’s National Theater was named Susan Sontag Square. It was an appropriate homage, Admir Glamočak said:

  Susan Sontag was made an honorary citizen of Sarajevo, the highest award the city gives: I don’t have that award. I don’t have my own square in front of the theater. Not only me, but none of the actors. Old actors get some little street in the suburbs once they’re dead. But I always think: if it’s Susan Sontag, she deserves that damn square.59

  Chapter 36

  The Susan Story

  Sontag produced Waiting for Godot in 1993, on her second visit to Sarajevo. She would return to Bosnia seven more times before the end of 1995, when the Dayton Accords were signed at an air force base in Ohio. The agreement ended the siege, but it partitioned Bosnia into the enclaves produced by “ethnic cleansing,” and rendered the country economically stagnant and politically impotent. During the years of the siege, Susan’s life would be inextricable from Bosnia’s, and her heroic actions would continue entirely without the publicity Godot had brought.

  On each trip, she brought rolls and rolls of deutsche marks, Bosnia’s unofficial currency, hidden inside her clothes, and distributed them to writers, actors, and humanitarian associations. She brought letters to a place that was cut off from the world and had no functioning post, and took them out when she left. She won the Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award in 1994 and dedicated the proceeds to Sarajevo. She tried to begin an elementary school for children unable to attend classes because of the war; she spoke ceaselessly for the Bosnian cause in Europe and the United States; she badgered friends in high places to help people escape Sarajevo.

  When Atka Kafedzić was refused a visa at the American embassy in Zagreb, she picked up the phone. “Give me half an hour and then go back to the embassy,” Susan ordered. The visa, needless to say, was granted, and eventually helped Atka’s entire family, fourteen people, begin new lives in New Zealand.1 Through Canadian PEN, she helped the poet Goran Simić, his wife Amela, and their two children reach Canada. “Susan even organized the housewarming party,” said Ferida Duraković—and for Ferida, who became pregnant during the war, Susan brought mountains of vitamins and prenatal medicines. And she helped Hasan Gluhić escape to the United States, since his work driving her during the Godot visit endangered him: “The [Islamic] Fundamentalists were against her and against the play,” he wrote in an affidavit requesting asylum in the United States.

  On January 3, 1994, I came home from work to find my wife in tears and my children trembling with fear. The door of my house was painted over with the words “traitor” and “heretic.” At work the following day I found a note on my desk that read, “Gluhić: Remember what happened to Salman Rushdie. An Islamic Bosnia has no place for people like you.”2

  Sontag’s archives bear evidence of her more than two years of vigorous efforts on Gluhić’s behalf. She wrote to everyone from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who arranged a public interest parole, to the Little Red School House, a private school in New York, to beg them to admit Gluhić’s children. And she found him a job working for Annie Leibovitz.

  * * *

  “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it,” said John Burns. “Susan became tremendously popular. There was a tremendous ease about her manner, and not a trace of superiority.”3 Pašović knew her outside Bosnia and understood that, in places like New York, she needed to keep a certain distance. “She wasn’t approachable, but that was her way to filter,” he said. “Here that attitude vanished. She was just normal, and people related to her.”4 One symbol of her normality was her refusal to wear a flak jacket. The gesture was remembered by dozens of Bosnians, for whom it was a discreet way of emphasizing her equality, her willingness to brave the same risks—of being killed, of being maimed—that they faced every day. To Miranda Spieler, who was working for her around this time in New York, “she described liking the fact that she could be shot. She was talking about how in a sense it was exciting for her, the fact of being able to die.”5

  Duraković recalled the intense camaraderie and the many positive feelings the war evoked:

  She would bring liquor and we had wonderful talks and one of the main questions she asked was “What is your feeling about life under the siege? Are you disappointed, are you depressed?” I said: Never in my life—I was thirty-six then—never in my life I was so alive. I feel so wonderful. I want to live, I want to write, I want to see dawn, I want to meet people. I have a hunger for it. And she said: “That’s so interesting, because when I got cancer that was for the first time in my life that I thought how wonderful is life.”6

  Kasia Gorska saw the change that Sarajevo brought her. “When she came back, she was just so loaded with energy. She was emanating this power from being right there in the center of those events.”7 In 1994, in the middle of the war, she began a novel called In America, which, when published in 2000, would be dedicated “To my friends in Sarajevo”—and “all that book was full of Sarajevo, full of energy from Sarajevo,” said Duraković. “She was alive here.”8

  But as love and success and money made her unhappy and unkind, her newfound purpose soured. Her indictment of the intellectuals who failed to rally to the side of Bosnia alienated the same people she was trying to recruit. If her activism was an inspiration, she wielded it as an admonishing finger, which was unfortunate, because there was no arguing with the analysis she offered in 1995:

  Individualism, and the cultivation of the self and private well-being—featuring, above all, the ideal of “health”—are the values to which intellectuals are most likely to subscribe. (“How can you spend so much time in a place where people smoke all the time?” someone
here in New York asked my son, the writer David Rieff, of his frequent trips to Bosnia.) It’s too much to expect that the triumph of consumer capitalism would have left the intellectual class unmarked. In the era of shopping, it has to be harder for intellectuals, who are anything but marginal and impoverished, to identify with less fortunate others.9

  Like many who had witnessed terrible things, she found it hard to put her experiences out of mind. She found it hard, too, to be around people “who don’t want to know what you know, don’t want you to talk about the sufferings, bewilderment, terror, and humiliations of the inhabitants of the city you’ve just left,” she wrote in 1995. “You find that the only people you feel comfortable with are those who have been to Bosnia, too. Or to some other slaughter.”10

  This was all perfectly understandable. But it became less so when, two years later, this same analysis led her to tell other intellectuals, in no uncertain terms, to shut up.

  You have no right to a public opinion unless you’ve been there, experienced firsthand and on the ground and for some considerable time the country, war, injustice, whatever, you are talking about.

  In the absence of such firsthand knowledge and experience: silence.11

  But did one have no right to deplore the siege of Sarajevo without personally experiencing the “whatever” being inflicted? Was there nothing to be learned about the world from literature or film or photography—from art?

  * * *

  The police went off duty. “Everything she said about Bosnia was admirable,” said Stephen Koch. “Her behavior about it was insufferable. Because if you had not gone to Sarajevo yourself, you were obviously just a morally inferior being. And she let that be known very clearly, with almost sneering condescension.”12 The need for moral invulnerability that had led to dalliances with questionable political causes in the past now unleashed behavior that offended people who were otherwise sympathetic and admiring.

  Her attitude could verge into the comical, wrote Terry Castle, who encountered her on “Palo Alto’s twee, boutique-crammed main drag.”13

  Sontag was wearing her trademark intellectual-diva outfit: voluminous black top and black silky slacks, accessorised with a number of exotic, billowy scarves. These she constantly adjusted or flung back imperiously over one shoulder, stopping now and then to puff on a cigarette or expel a series of phlegmy coughs. (The famous Sontag “look” always put me in mind of the stage direction in Blithe Spirit: “Enter Madame Arcati, wearing barbaric jewellery.”) . . .

  She’d been telling me about the siege and how a Yugoslav woman she had taken shelter with had asked her for her autograph, even as bombs fell around them. She relished the woman’s obvious intelligence (“Of course, Terry, she’d read The Volcano Lover, and like all Europeans, admired it tremendously”) and her own sangfroid. Then she stopped abruptly and asked, grim-faced, if I’d ever had to evade sniper fire. I said, no, unfortunately not. Lickety-split she was off—dashing in a feverish crouch from one boutique doorway to the next, white tennis shoes a blur, all the way down the street to Restoration Hardware and the Baskin-Robbins store. Five or six perplexed Palo Altans stopped to watch as she bobbed zanily in and out, ducking her head, pointing at imaginary gunmen on rooftops and gesticulating wildly at me to follow.

  But she went beyond unintentional comedy. At a party in New York, her behavior caused Salman Rushdie to remark the fault lines in her personality.

  She was really two Susans, Good Susan and Bad Susan, and while Good Susan was brilliant and funny and loyal and rather grand, Bad Susan could be a bullying monster. A junior Wylie agency employee said something about the Bosnian conflict that was not to Susan’s liking and Bad Susan came roaring out of her and the junior Wylie agent was in danger of being devoured.14

  Richmond Burton saw behavior once reserved for Annie leaking into all her interactions, “a martyr complex” linked to an abusiveness toward people. “Her patience had just worn down,” he said, “and it was somehow linked with Sarajevo. It kind of took over. Everything was another occasion for a tantrum. You’d think: Don’t go there, Susan. And yet she did.”15

  She began speaking of herself in grandiose terms:

  Whatever I would do, whatever vocation I would assume, I know that I would not assume it in this selfish spirit. If I had become a doctor, I would have worked in a big hospital—I would not have had a private practice, sit in an office and see people coming with their silly problems and make a lot of money. No, I would have worked in a big hospital with poor people . . .16

  “Something happened in which she was really seeing herself as this almost sacrificial heroic figure, in terms of her involvement in Sarajevo,” said Burton. “I even heard her describe herself on the phone—comparing herself to Joan of Arc.”17

  * * *

  The years during and after her involvement with Sarajevo became the golden age of the “Susan Story,” whose protagonist was unable to perceive how she was perceived.

  The woman who thought of herself as Joan of Arc was the same woman who ate so much caviar at Petrossian on Fifty-Eighth Street that, Larry McMurtry said, she “decimated the species.” A series of movies and bestsellers had made him rich, and Susan took full advantage of his good fortune. One evening, his flight from Washington was delayed, and when he got to the restaurant, the maître d’ told him that Ms. Sontag had departed, leaving him a piece of paper: a bill for the sumptuous, multicourse caviar dinner to which Susan had helped herself.18

  Greg Chandler, a new assistant, witnessed many tantrums. One took place in the summer of 1995, when she had to go to Madrid for the Spanish publication of The Volcano Lover. She hated having to go. Before the trip, she handed him a giant box with coins from all over the world that she had been collecting for decades, and instructed him to pluck out the pesetas. When he was finally finished, Susan examined his triage and spotted a franc. She brandished it reproachfully: “This is a franc!” she screamed. “This is a franc! What the fuck am I going to do with a franc in Spain?” She flew into a rage, then took the coins and flung them all around the room.

  “I dutifully cleaned up the mess,” said Chandler, “feeling like Christina Crawford.”19

  * * *

  “I have preferred to write as little as possible of my relations with my mother in the last decade of her life, but suffice it to say that they were often strained,” David acknowledged.20

  Even the people in Susan’s entourage who disliked or resented David agreed that he was in an impossible position, as his engagement with Bosnia showed. In 1995, he published Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, an indictment of the “international community”: the people Bosnians meant when they joked about “waiting for Clinton.” The book addressed many of the linguistic questions that Susan had posed in Vietnam. “The French were ‘the French colonialists’; the Americans are ‘imperialist aggressors,’” she wrote then.21 Now, David wrote that “The Chetniks were fascist aggressors in the strictest sense of the term, and the defense of Sarajevo was heroic.”22 They shared some interests, but David’s was the work of a journalist rather than an aesthete, far more rooted in real politics than anything Susan could write.

  From David’s perspective, Susan’s involvement in Bosnia was awkward. This was in part because he had brought her there himself, and in part because she had not been unambiguously supportive of his writing. In January 1993, Annie organized a Nile cruise for Susan’s sixtieth birthday. Among the guests were Howard Hodgkin, who contributed his paintings to “The Way We Live Now,” and his partner, Antony Peattie. “She was scathing about [David’s] writing, his affairs, his life,” said Peattie.23 And Hodgkin saw “the verbal equivalent of sawing him off at the ankles whenever the opportunity arose. She was really very nasty.”24

  In Bosnia, David had discovered a mission. After meeting Bosnian refugees in Germany, he felt “the strongest sense of compulsion I have ever known as a writer . . . and boarded a flight to Zagreb.”25 Faced with the horror and injustice of the B
osnian war, he could hardly speak of anything else. Back in New York, he tried to convince others to come to Sarajevo: “I invited dozens of people, but the only person I persuaded was my own mother!”26

  She was aware of the conundrum her presence created for David. In public, she would defer to him. “I’m not going to write a book because I think in this family business there must be a division of labor—he writes the book,” she declared on her first visit to Sarajevo.27 Two decades before, Paul Thek had denounced “the establishment of the Sontag dynasty in Amer. Letters.” Now, she still thought of writing as a “family business.” At first, she tried to keep to the side, “because she thought this was David’s story,” said Haris Pašović, “but later it was inevitable that she would also write about it.”28 David simply said: “It was not a promise she was able to keep.”

  Even before she came, he knew that if she got involved, “her role would inevitably eclipse mine.”

  I was proud of what I had done in Bosnia. I had worked mainly in the north, in Serb-occupied Banja Luka and around the camps—a terrifying part of the world in the day. I had taken enormous physical risks and paid dearly for my willingness to do so (I was badly hurt, and by all rights should have died, in the fall of ’92 near Zenica in Central Bosnia). And Bosnia was my cause—perhaps the only one I have ever fully believed in.29

  But he had a clear choice to make. “Which was more important, the attention Sarajevo would derive from my mother taking up the Bosnian cause and working there, or my own ego and ambition? Bosnia was infinitely more important than my wish not to be eclipsed by my mother.” David was careful to give Susan credit for what she accomplished in Sarajevo, but what was good for Bosnia was not necessarily good for their relationship.

  We were estranged, but there was no break. We still saw each other, and there are moments in the diaries where she talks, before Bosnia, about my not being available, to my being less there for her. It wasn’t like Thor’s hammerbolt: Bosnia happened and everything changed between us. But it didn’t help.