Sontag

by Benjamin Moser

  * * *

  The title of In America alludes to a place where an individual need have no fixed identity. This notion partly reflects Sontag’s experience in Bosnia, to which she refers in the preface. In Bosnia, and by extension in Europe, identities were immutable—even those identities that people, like the Yugoslavs, were hardly aware they possessed.

  “The past is not really important here,” she wrote. “Here the present does not affirm the past but supersedes and cancels it.”29 Critics frequently mentioned this characterization. “Europe is about the past, about roots and tradition; America is about the present, about freedom and newness and change,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times.

  America, we’re told, is “where the poor can become rich and everyone stands equal before the law, where streets are paved with gold.” America is “where the future is being born.” America is where “everything is supposed to be possible.”

  “The American,” Ryszard declares in a letter, “is someone who is always leaving everything behind.”30

  Though hackneyed, this depiction never seems indignant or malicious, as Sontag’s Vietnam-era writings sometimes had. Instead, it adds up to a place where identities are switched and shed at will: “a whole country of people who believe in the will.”31 In Vietnam, she condemned “the principle of ‘will’” as “what’s most ugly in America.” In 1960, she noted in her journals a “project: to destroy the will.” Now, unambiguously, she praised the American will, and Maryna’s journeys amount to a “geographical cure”—an escape. “Happiness depended on not being trapped in your individual existence, a container with your name on it,”32 she wrote. Her success strengthens Maryna’s belief in the will: “I have proved to myself once and for all that with a strong enough will one can surmount any obstacle.”33

  But not even the greatest actresses can avoid certain “traps,” especially the cruelest trap of all. Fake death was a theme in Sontag’s youthful fiction, and it returns in this novel in a stupendously literal form.

  It was generally acknowledged that her greatest success in dying was in Camille, during one performance of which, reported the town’s leading newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise, two members of the audience, in different parts of the thousand-seat theatre, were so transfixed with horror at seeing Marguerite spring from her couch and fall with a terrifying crash, dead, upon the floor, that both were struck with a rigidifying paralysis and remained unable to rise from their seats for a full hour after the performance had ended.34

  For her willfulness, for her determination to overcome death, her minions praise her.

  “She just doesn’t know how to die,” said Ryszard.

  “An inspiration to us all,” said Mrs. Withington.35

  * * *

  In June 1998, as she was writing these words, Susan was staying with Paolo Dilonardo in Bari, finishing the book. She had met him when he translated The Volcano Lover. “He looked strange and interesting,” said Annie. “And she loved Italy, and she’d had so many great romances, such a great life there, and she liked hearing that Italian accent.”36 Where David challenged and often fought with her, Paolo never disagreed with her, and Susan felt confident with this good son nearby.

  Now, the heroine of the will was beginning to bump up against real life. “Perhaps, Maryna wondered gloomily, she had used up the allotted number of impossible feats her will could make possible.”37 This wondering happens toward the end of the book. “Nothing can stop me now,” Susan thought as she was writing it. A few days later, she started urinating blood.38

  Chapter 38

  The Sea Creature

  For nearly twenty-five years, Sontag had been dreading the recurrence of cancer. In July 1998, back in New York, the diagnosis arrived: uterine sarcoma. The tumor was the size of a grapefruit, she told a friend, spiked “like a sea creature.”1 This creature was eating her from the inside, and the treatment was a hysterectomy followed by radiation and chemotherapy. It involved doses of cisplatin, a platinum-based drug. This might be effective in combating her sarcoma, she was warned, but it filled her body with heavy metals, which could later provoke different diseases.

  Susan was now sixty-five and had a good idea of what treatment would involve. “She was sure she was going to die,” said Michael Silverblatt. “She felt she could face the cancer, but I’m not sure she felt she could face the chemo and all the subsequent weakening that the treatment would involve.” She said these things “very simply.” But if she was daunted by the ordeal, she was also bravely determined to get through it. She once said to a friend whose partner had cancer: “Remember: this is not a detour in her life. This is her life.”2 And now, said Silverblatt, “her life became facing the disease. She made her home into a field of battle. She kept records of all her blood work. Anything a doctor had, she had, too. She had her X-rays on her computer.”3

  She focused on the physical aspects of the disease in order to allay her suffering and fear. This focus was what she had offered others in the same situation. “My purpose was, above all, practical,” she said of writing Illness as Metaphor, which had appeared twenty-one years before. During her first cancer, when she asked other patients what drugs they were receiving, they would inevitably answer “chemo.” Now, she marveled that when she asked the same question, “polysyllables would come tripping off their tongues.”4 The responsibility was not hers alone, but her insistence that patients ought not submit unquestioningly to medical authority meant that many people were, like her, hitting the books. And not only the books: “The Internet is the new Ground Zero of 21st century illness.”5

  She saw negative changes, too. Like everything else, sickness and health were products to be marketed and consumed. “The pharmaceutical industry plays a huge, if not actually controlling, role, its paraphernalia and propaganda reaching directly into the waiting room, the examination room, and the hospital room. New capitalist medicine—which is ruled by the bureaucracies of insurance companies—has undermined in a far more radical way the authority of doctors to make independent decisions on behalf of patients.” As always, she was attentive to the language in which this change was cloaked. The doctor is “a purveyor of medical services,” she wrote; the patient, “a consumer of medical services.”6

  Her sickness brought up another fear: that she would not live to complete In America. She thought that finishing the book was more important than survival itself, and Silverblatt agreed. Even if she died, he said, it would be a great final triumph: “I thought that finishing the book was at least as important as dealing with her cancer.” She pressed on, and the book bears the shadow of her struggle. “You feel it’s been born with pain,” said Kasia Gorska.7

  Indeed, something unspeakable, something that cannot be named, lurks beneath the novel’s swaggering surface. “And could Maryna herself be—? Was it now her turn to come down with—?”8 In America’s final scene is a single paragraph, twenty-seven pages long; and if it occasionally reads like a rant, that is because it was produced “in a cloud of painkillers,” said Joan Acocella, who interviewed her in 2000.9 For at least two years, Sontag would be in severe pain, and she would never be entirely well again: she developed neuropathy in her feet, which made it difficult for her to walk, and forced her into physiotherapy.

  But the cancer had a consolation. In the mid-nineties, as her relationship with Annie degenerated, she and Lucinda rekindled their affair. Susan had never stopped loving Lucinda, and brushed off Annie’s protests. Carried on principally in Europe, the relationship wounded Annie; but the need to take care of Susan inspired the women to join forces to care for her.10

  * * *

  “God knew how weak she was,” she wrote of Maryna, “but forgave her because she tried so hard.”11 Sontag, forever “trying a little too hard,” was less forgiving of herself. Behind Maryna’s sentiment is an idea—the idea of the American secular puritan—that salvation is a reward for a pitiless work ethic. Once Susan vanquished the cancer, she was even more than usua
lly determined to wring the most out of life. “There are just 24 hours in a day,” she said, “though I try to treat it as though there were 48.”12

  This determination seemed admirable—inspiring, even. But she pushed herself mercilessly. If, when she was sick, she displayed a single-minded devotion to science and treatment, she seemed to forget this devotion as soon as she was healthy again, neglecting her body and rejecting “the ideal of ‘health’” as a bourgeois egotism. Despite loving science, as David wrote, “with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity,”13 her disregard for the most basic scientific guidelines shocked those close to her.

  Ever since she read Martin Eden, she had equated sleep and death. Greg Chandler noted her “bizarre obsession with sleep,” and said that she “often took naps and would deny it even to me after I’d gone into the bedroom and seen her—and heard the powerful snoring.” This was Terry Castle’s experience, too, when she arrived in London Terrace and found a Sontag who had obviously just been roused. She apologized for waking her.

  It was as if I had accused her of never having read Proust, or of watching soap operas all day. Her face instantly darkened and she snapped at me violently. Why on earth did I think she’d been having a nap? Didn’t I know she never had naps? Of course she wasn’t having a nap! She would never have a nap! Never in a million years! What a stupid remark to make! How had I gotten so stupid? A nap—for God’s sake!14

  Susan had long stunned others with her appetite: for food, for culture, for experience. She referred to it as her “legendary energy”—her ability to march from one event to the next, never displaying the slightest sign of fatigue, professing dismay with anyone unable to keep up.15

  * * *

  In Sarajevo, she spent many a candlelit night with John Burns, the New York Times correspondent: “I can see that badger hair now.” Burns was recovering from near-fatal cancer, and they discussed the suffering engendered by stereotypes around illness. He recalled a “mind-over-matter” doctor who gave him crayons and encouraged him to “make cancer your friend.” They laughed. But Burns confessed that when he became ill he had, in fact, imagined that he had “mocked God.” And “Susan understood what I felt about cancer being a punishment.”16

  Cancer was not a punishment for mocking God. But it could be a punishment for mocking science, and even Susan, so dismissive of “health,” was aware that smoking was a bad idea. In 1993, a Brazilian reporter called her back to ask what brand of cigarettes she was smoking during their interview. “Susan was furious,” he remembered. “She said it would be shameful for her to give out that information, since she’d had cancer and didn’t want people to know she still smoked.”17 She was still smoking at least two packs a day, and sometimes, when she was out with Karla and a photographer approached, “she would shove the cigarette into my hand, even if I already had one.”18

  In 1995, three years before her second cancer, she attended a program called Smokenders. Her course book is filled with the kind of “pop psychology” jargon she found hilarious. Much of it was related to “Freud’s general thesis—sickness conceived of as historical.” She noted, “Your attitude is the only difference between success and failure.” She chirped, “Avoid self-pity—laugh at yourself—pick yourself up.” And she encouraged herself: “Self-pity is a negative thought—replace it with a positive thought. Eliminating self-pity allows self-respect to return.”19 There was practical advice: “Don’t wash ashtray until next week,” the great student noted. “No smoking in any trigger situation.”

  This was all standard for smoking cessation programs, but it appears, in Sontag’s handwriting, like Duchampian ready-mades.

  observe smokers

  do they look glamorous

  do they look as if they’re

  enjoying themselves

  The key to self-improvement was “advertising to yourself.”

  Say it to yourself out loud

  when you wake up,

  when you go to bed

  “good strong

  positive thought”

  There are “Reasons why I want to quit smoking (specific)”:

  So I won’t get lung cancer

  So I can avoid emphysema

  To please David

  To stop coughing

  And “Dreams (things you would still like to accomplish, do . . .)”:

  Go up/down the Amazon

  Have great sex

  A phrase of William James’s makes a surprising appearance amid the “Smokendertalk.” He had said that “the greatest discovery of my generation is that people can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.” Not always: Susan failed to quit smoking. But Smokenders and organizations like it popularized the writings of James and Freud’s generation, their contention that mental attitudes—the will—could, when consciously steered, improve lives. If their ideas in part derived from religion, these ideas were reinvented without the moralism—the concept of sin, of mocking God—that underpinned earlier approaches to self-improvement. A Christian imagined the passion of Christ. A psychotherapeutic patient used her imagination, too.

  A belief in the reality of dreams had created Sontag and kept her going through a difficult life. So many of her difficulties came from her refusal to see what most people thought of as reality. But there was a usefulness to the dreamworld. “Create ‘dream picture,’” the Smokenders instructor said. “Something pleasing, relaxing . . . use for distraction.” As it happened, she had lived her life in the “dream picture.” In certain respects, this was a strength, and an anesthetic. She refused to accept limitations—to her talent, to her achievements, to her possibilities for reinvention—that would have stymied more clear-eyed people.

  On October 19, 1998, when The New York Review of Books celebrated its thirty-fifth anniversary, a gaunt Sontag attended in a long black wig. And in the spring of 1999, she was strong enough to return to Bari. She needed Paolo’s unconditional support in order to finish the book. But she was distracted by the disaster still unfolding across the Adriatic: the last act in Slobodan Milošević’s wars.

  * * *

  In 1995, the Dayton Accords put an end to the Bosnian war. But Milošević was determined to teach a lesson to yet another former Yugoslav people, the Albanians of Kosovo. In Communist Yugoslavia, this Serbian province had enjoyed a large degree of autonomy, but that autonomy was curtailed during the breakup of Yugoslavia, and vigorous repression of the Kosovo Albanians—90 percent of the population—began. Amid the general calamity, this repression had not received the attention that it deserved; but to anyone watching, it seemed only a matter of time before it degenerated into open warfare. When Milošević’s army began an ethnic cleansing operation that resulted in the expulsion of around a million people, the “international community” that had sat on its hands in Bosnia had finally had enough.

  The Kosovars would not be waiting for Clinton as long as the Bosnians had. On March 24, 1999, NATO began bombing Serbia. Over the seventy-eight days of the campaign, President Clinton was criticized by many of the same people who had criticized botched American interventions in the past, from Vietnam and Cuba in the sixties to Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Panama in the eighties. But if readers of “Trip to Hanoi” expected to find Susan Sontag among them, they were disappointed by a long essay published in the New York Times on May 2.

  “Why Are We in Kosovo?” was written in Bari. This was not far from an Italian air base from which NATO planes left for sorties over Serbia. Many Italians opposed the bombing. “The right is against immigrants,” Sontag wrote. “The left is against America.” Much of the piece criticizes Europeans for abandoning the ideals of postwar Europe: “The Europe that let Bosnia die.” It was the same disappointment in Europe that appears in In America. That book portrayed a vulgar and materialistic America; but as she nevertheless embraced her country in that book, now she argued that Clinton was right to intervene.20 “Not all violence is equally reprehensible,” she insisted. “Not all wars are equally u
njust.”

  The essay, like so much of her work, is an argument about how to see. It opens with a friend’s call from New York, asking her whether Sontag, in Italy, could hear bombs exploding in Serbia. Her “geographyless American friend’s vision of European countries being only slightly larger than postage stamps” is easy to mock. But geography was the least of it. Anyone paying attention could see what was happening in Kosovo. It was not a question of where one was—but where, and whether, one was willing to look.

  Of course, it is easy to turn your eyes from what is happening if it is not happening to you. Or if you have not put yourself where it is happening. I remember in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993 a Bosnian friend telling me ruefully that in 1991, when she saw on her TV set the footage of Vukovar utterly leveled by the Serbs, she thought to herself, How terrible, but that’s in Croatia, that can never happen here in Bosnia . . . and switched the channel.21

  This support did not go unnoticed in Washington. And a few days later, Susan was invited to a state dinner at the White House. The guest of honor was the president of Hungary, Árpád Göncz. He had been sentenced to death under the Communist regime, taught himself English in prison, and became a writer and translator once he was freed. Among his publications was an anthology, A pusztulás képei (The Imagination of Disaster), which collected many of Susan’s essays, including “The Aesthetics of Silence” and “Notes on ‘Camp.’”22

  The Kosovo campaign was ongoing; and in his toast, President Clinton saluted President Göncz’s commitment to the “European” principles Susan had seen abandoned in Sarajevo.

  Your vision of people living together and nations living together, resolving differences peacefully, drawing strength from their diversity, treating all people with equal dignity, this will form the basis of a better future for Europe and the world.23

  Susan reflected on how certain politicians could make an interlocutor feel like the center of the world. She was especially impressed by a quality in Bill Clinton—an aspect of his smile, his gaze, his intensity—that many of her friends thought she herself possessed. In thirty seconds, she told Michael Silverblatt, he focused an attention on you that gave you the illusion of a treasured intimacy. This dinner took place on June 8, 1999. Two days later, the NATO bombing campaign ended, and Yugoslav troops withdrew from Kosovo.