Another friend, the Palestinian American writer Edward Said, also begged Susan to refuse.
Israel is in its 33rd year of a brutal military occupation, the longest (except for Japan’s 35 year occupation of Korea) in the 20th and 21st centuries. . . . This is not a war between two states, but a colonial military action by one state against a stateless, dispossessed, poorly led people.
Thus, your charismatic presence for the Prize and your acceptance of it is, for the Israeli government, a badly needed boost to its poor international standing, a symbol that the greatest talents in the end subscribe to what Israel is doing.7
Susan never responded to Gordimer. To Said, she wrote: “Wouldn’t refusing the Prize—and how do I make that known? hold a press conference? write an Op-Ed piece for the Times?—be a lot less serious as a gesture than my going there and speaking out.”8 It was an odd comment: she found the op-ed page of the Times a serious enough place to denounce ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, the persecution of writers in China, and, soon enough, American torture in Iraq.
“She really went off” when Shaughnessy passed on a message from a Jewish lawyer who believed that what Sontag called “the Nobel Prize for Israel” was inappropriate. She was angry that Brenda agreed: “I think she was worried about her legacy. She was worried that people would forget about her.”
Susan’s acceptance speech offered bromides—“the writers and readers in Israel and Palestine struggling to create literature made of singular voices and the multiplicity of truth”—and included an attack on writers who lacked her moral gallantry.
Have all the writers who have won the prize really championed the Freedom of the Individual in Society? Is that what they—now I must say “we”—have in common?
I think not.
Not only do they represent a large spectrum of political opinion. Some of them have barely touched the Big Words: freedom, individual, society . . .
But it isn’t what a writer says that matters, it’s what a writer is.9
Edward Said found the speech “staggeringly bad,”10 and her ruminations on “righteous action” made no mention that there were no Arabs or Muslims at the Jerusalem Book Fair, where the prize was given.11
* * *
Shaughnessy loved Susan’s advice. “It was never very sweetly presented,” she said. “It was always sort of cruel. But it was brilliant advice.” Much of it had to do with claiming the prizes on offer. Susan demanded to know whether Brenda had applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship, and when Brenda protested that she was far too young for such an honor, Susan exploded. “It is not your job to reject yourself. It is their job. You put your name in the hat. If they reject you, that is their job. It has nothing to do with you! Why are you making it all about yourself? You are so egotistical!” Brenda dutifully applied—and applied, and applied, and applied, and applied. Finally, on her eleventh attempt, she got it.
Others received advice from her: similarly brusque, similarly vital. She granted Richmond Burton permission to have thoughts he was previously too timid to express at galleries and museums.
She would be very quick to make pronouncements that I usually agreed with but that everyone else was afraid to say. She would say, “Listen, Richmond, most people are just afraid of their feelings.” That was such a gift to have that understanding, and to have it spelled out, especially by her.12
She told Michael Silverblatt to grow up. As a boy, he was found to be allergic to dust and dirt, and his parents incinerated his stuffed animals. As an adult, he began to collect toys. “You will throw them out,” she ordained. “Every one of them. You are not a child anymore. You have been doing that crazy child thing for too long. I’m not angry at you, but you will stop. Simply stop. Turn your back on childhood.” He obeyed, and was forever glad. And he saw the advice she gave others:
She told Jimmy McCourt, “Jimmy, I don’t know how you did it, but you’ve got a lover who’s worth your time, and he’s worth yours; and if you continue to drink the way you drink you will lose him. You will lose him, and you think that you’re someone. You’re a writer of a barely known specialty novel. Who knows if you’ll write another?” And Jimmy, instead of taking offense, became a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he and his boyfriend are still together today largely because of Susan. So for all the people who may have been destroyed or distraught by things Susan said, there are an equal number of people whose lives she saved—my own among them.13
Klaus Biesenbach, a young German curator who was close to her in her final years, remembered Susan’s screaming at him at four in the morning while they were buying French fries in Berlin: he had misused a word. The incident changed his whole approach to his work: “She made you aware that everything you do, every word you use, has an impact. Everything has a meaning. You have to be incredibly precise and focused.” He understood why she emphasized the meaning of words. “Klaus,” she said, “as a curator, as a critic, the only thing we have is our opinion. Never sell that, never give that away. That’s the only thing you have.”14
“It’s as if she sat on my head,” said Burton. “She remains an idealized authority figure.” But in some cases, authority slipped into authoritarianism. After Susan’s death, said Shaughnessy, “I was really shocked when those women [including Terry Castle and Sigrid Nunez] mentioned that she’d say they were stupid. None of them are stupid.” She began to consult a therapist to understand her attraction to someone who treated her so badly. As in any abusive relationship, cruelty makes the occasional kindness all the more narcotic. “When she would shine this love on me—when she didn’t think I was an idiot, for that moment—it was just spectacular.”
* * *
Infatuation came easily to Sontag, and she was therefore more susceptible to disappointment than a woman more reticent in her enthusiasms, clearer in her judgment of people, and ironic about her own shortcomings. But there was one friend who had never disappointed her, and that, for lack of a better word, was Art. In 2001, she published Where the Stress Falls, which pays reverence to that friend, and shows the charisma of her admiration.
Admiration was directed at others when one could not quite admire oneself, she wrote in The Volcano Lover: “He wanted to admire himself, but he was even quicker to admire anyone he loved.” Lady Hamilton’s “passion is admiration,”15 and so was hers. To admire was to participate in something greater, purer, more beautiful than oneself; and admiration suited her personality—a crush, a passion—not the long steady work of loving but the quick flush of falling in love.
Where the Stress Falls gathers twenty years of exercises in admiration. It is full of aspirations to the ideal, whether the ideal work of art or the ideal “serious” life—moral, artistic, political. It contains writings on books, films, and dance; on people she loved as a child, like Richard Halliburton, and as an adult, like Lucinda Childs and Joseph Brodsky. It includes the places that marked her, particularly Sarajevo. And it illustrates one of the most important services she lent to the arts. Since Against Interpretation, she had been renowned for bringing the news of artistic developments in a way that only one with her extensive travels and broad reading could have. There are essays on Danilo Kiš and Juan Rulfo and Machado de Assis; on Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Howard Hodgkin.
Over the years, “Susan Sontag” had become synonymous with high culture, and Where the Stress Falls helps explain why. She was the one intellectual recognized by people who knew nothing about intellectuals. She was the guru in Woody Allen’s Zelig, the genius on the cover of Vanity Fair—as well as the woman who, in 2000, allowed herself to be photographed by Annie Leibovitz for an Absolut Vodka advertisement. These popularizations might have been tacky, but in the age of shopping, culture needed defenders who could venture into the demotic. Sontag was a hopeful figure for those who felt that culture was worth defending.
The idea of the woman who went to every opening and saw every opera and read every book and resisted the siege of Sarajevo through dramaturgy alone was essential.
For Susan, the person, it meant a degree of pressure that was beginning to madden her. In Israel, she claimed that the importance of a writer lay in what she was. But Sontag’s real importance increasingly lay in what she represented. The metaphor of “Susan Sontag” was a great original creation. It rose far above her individual life, and outlived her, and helps explain why discriminating critics like Joan Acocella were merciful to Susan—graded her on a moral curve.
* * *
Where the Stress Falls contains an essay, “Borland’s Babies,” about the Australian photographer Polly Borland’s images of adult men who dress as infants. Borland shows “an intimate, private space whose banal activities—yowling, drooling, eating, sleeping, bathing, masturbating—here acquire the character of weird rituals, because they’re done by adult men dressed as, and carrying on like, babies.” The magic of Borland’s Photograph, Sontag writes, is that these apparently freakish people are not depicted as such. They have none of the “ingenuous stare of a Diane Arbus picture.”
The pictures register a truth about human nature which seems almost too obvious to spell out—the temptation of regression? the pleasures of regression?—but which has never received so keen, so direct a depiction. They invite our identification (“nothing human is alien to me”)—daring us to admit that we, too, can imagine such feelings, even if we are astonished that some people actually go to the trouble, and assume the shame, of acting them out.16
This was a fantasy of Susan’s, too, despite the revulsion she often professed for childhood. (“It was partly so as not to feel like a child, ever, that she had become an actress.”17) Childishness in her friends evoked stern reproaches. “You have to turn your back on childhood,” she told Silverblatt.
Ironically, though, she turned her lovers, including Irene, Carlotta, Nicole, and Lucinda, into avatars of her own mother. So when, in 2000, Annie decided to have a baby on her own, her age—fifty-one—was the least of her difficulties. Susan had long mocked her for the very notion. “She made fun of her wanting to have a child,” said Karla Eoff.18 Shaughnessy saw how upset she was that Annie was embarking on the pregnancy “without her permission.” One day, at lunch, she broke down. “I’m falling apart,” she confessed. “Annie’s leaving me. She’s having a baby without me.”19
“I had a lot I wanted to give,” said Annie. “And I was giving a lot to Susan, but I wanted to give more. I wanted to give more love. I come from a big family, and I wanted to have children. I mean, I really was moving on. And eventually we were going our own ways.” She wanted to help Susan do something she had always dreamed of: “I am so happy to have Sarah. What is it for you?” She bought an apartment for Susan to use on the rue Seguier, in the Hôtel Feydeau de Montholon, on the banks of the Seine, with spectacular views of Notre-Dame. “The Paris apartment was a place for her to write,” Annie said.20
Susan came to love Sarah. Annie took a picture of the two on a Long Island beach: one approaching the end of her life, another still at the beginning. “I look at those pictures,” Annie said, laughing, “and I think: Which one is the child?”21
* * *
After two or three years, Shaughnessy, with Susan’s help, got a fellowship to Japan, her mother’s country. She was living in Tokyo, where Susan was coming to judge an art contest. Brenda was excited to see her, but when Susan arrived, “very agitated,” she began battering Brenda with questions. “She was talking a mile a minute in a manic way, talking too much. ‘How do you like it here? How do you like it here? How do you like Tokyo?’ I said, ‘I love it.’ She goes, ‘What do you like about it? Tell me what you like about it! Why do you love it so much?’”
Brenda had often had the experience of answering Susan—only to have Susan dismiss her as dumb or ridiculous. Now, fortified by the distance of her months in Japan, she made up her mind to give an honest answer: she was fascinated by the conjunction of an ancient culture with the most futuristic novelty.
She just gestures around with her arms wide open and goes, “How can you love this? It’s the end of reading!”
I said, “What do you mean, it’s the end of reading?” “It’s the end of reading! Everything you love! Books! Everything you love! This is the end of it! This is the end of reading!” She was freaking out. I’m like, “Why are you always so negative? Why do you want to fight with me? I don’t want to fight with you.” Now I’m crying and I’m yelling. I don’t even notice how funny this is. Because in retrospect it’s really funny that she said that Tokyo is the end of reading.
I’m crying, and I’ve never done this before, but I finally say to her, “You know what? I can’t do this. I’m not going to lunch with you. I’m walking away.”
I turned away and she grabbed my arm, physically grabbed my arm, and says, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me here.” I’m like, “Okay, okay.” I suddenly realized that she felt helpless, that she actually couldn’t get around in Tokyo by herself.
She always acted like, “Oh, I’ve been to Japan a hundred times, and I know everything.” The truth is she was terrified of being left on that street corner by herself. She says, “I can’t get back to the hotel. I don’t know how to get back to the hotel.” She was staying at a major hotel. It wasn’t going to be that hard. But she seemed really, really upset. She still had a grip on my arm. I said, “Okay, fine. Let’s just forget it. Let’s just forget it. Let’s go to lunch.”22
Chapter 41
A Spectator of Calamities
In early 2001, Susan returned with David to Sarajevo, where she had also rung in the millennium. It was the ideal place to celebrate it, she said. The twentieth century had started in Sarajevo, with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914, and ended there, too, with the siege of 1992. She was always happier there, said her friend Senada Kreso, who had been a Bosnian government spokeswoman. Kreso found her “in a fantastic mood . . . full of energy.” They went to “one of the rare good restaurants in Sarajevo.”
We laughed like mad, we laughed our heads off, we ate, we got completely drunk. . . . It was the first time David and I got her involved with small talk, like astrology. I read those books, and David also read those books, like Linda Goodman’s Star Signs and Love Signs. And it was for her a revelation. A discovery of a completely new realm.1
Soon, she learned about Annie’s pregnancy. In February, she gave a lecture in Oxford that became Regarding the Pain of Others, the last book published in her lifetime. The lecture, and then the book, continued the arguments of almost all her works—about the writer and politics, language and war, image and cruelty. “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience,” she wrote in that book.
On the afternoon of September 11, she was that spectator—and the country was her own. That morning, teams of terrorists boarded airplanes, overpowered their pilots, and aimed the planes at the heart of the American empire. One, heading toward Washington, was retaken by its passengers and crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Another destroyed a large part of the Pentagon. Two others hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, causing the buildings, once the tallest in the world, to crash to the ground. On live television, people trapped on the upper floors jumped a hundred stories to their deaths. Among the millions of spectators was Susan Sontag, who was staying at the Hotel Adlon, in central Berlin.
Sixty years before, Pearl Harbor united the nation against a mortal threat. So, for a time, did the attacks of September 11. But it soon became clear that the attacks would be used for the narrow partisan advantage of an unpopular president, George W. Bush, the first to take office without winning a popular majority since 1888. He understood that, in the face of such apocalyptic attacks, most Americans would see rallying behind their government as a patriotic duty. The man who ended his term as the least-popular president since scientific polling began briefly enjoyed a stunning 92 percent approval.
For weeks, Manhattan was blanketed with missing-persons posters, and with the gruesome stench of the smol
dering ruins. A week later, military-grade anthrax began appearing in the mailboxes of senators and journalists, eventually killing five people. These attacks, never convincingly solved, added to the apocalyptic mood. Everyone agreed that something had to be done. No one was thinking about metaphor.
* * *
Almost no one. Two days after the attacks, as Susan sat glued to the television in her suite at the Adlon, her old friend Sharon DeLano at The New Yorker asked her to write something short for the magazine. She contributed three paragraphs.
The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.
Our leaders are bent on convincing us that everything is O.K. America is not afraid. Our spirit is unbroken, although this was a day that will live in infamy and America is now at war. But everything is not O.K. And this was not Pearl Harbor. We have a robotic President who assures us that America still stands tall. A wide spectrum of public figures, in and out of office, who are strongly opposed to the policies being pursued abroad by this Administration apparently feel free to say nothing more than that they stand united behind President Bush. A lot of thinking needs to be done, and perhaps is being done in Washington and elsewhere, about the ineptitude of American intelligence and counter-intelligence, about options available to American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East, and about what constitutes a smart program of military defense. But the public is not being asked to bear much of the burden of reality. The unanimously applauded, self-congratulatory bromides of a Soviet Party Congress seemed contemptible. The unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators in recent days seems, well, unworthy of a mature democracy.
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