Waiting for the Barbarians

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  The contrast between the pointed effectiveness and verbal élan of Sontag’s critical writing and the bloated grandiosities of her fiction makes it that much more regrettable that, as time passed, the criticism itself seemed to metamorphose, to change direction and tone.

  Like Wilde, whose arguments and aphoristic dazzle she appropriated, Sontag achieved considerable fame and authority early on by rebelling against staid, academic, old-fashioned intellectual culture. And like Wilde, she paradoxically used the tools provided by a formidable traditional education (he as a classicist, she as a student of philosophy and a precocious autodidact) to reject the academy, carving out a career for herself instead as a popular literary figure—a move that surely accounts for the cult-like status that she, like Wilde, enjoyed. Both were intellectuals who made good, who achieved glamour in the great world. And yet, once she had made her name with those extraordinarily cunning and excitingly fresh validations of popular American culture, Sontag went on to spend the rest of her career as a tireless cheerleader for the canon, for what she referred to, with telling frequency, as “greatness”—a quality that, strikingly, she seemed increasingly to find only in the works of middle-aged, white, European men.

  This is most apparent in the later essays, such as those collected in Where the Stress Falls (2001). These pieces were written in the years after she published the last of her significant works of cultural criticism, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors—texts in which she brilliantly brings a calm philological eye to reveal the cultural anxieties and prejudices that lie beneath the overwrought diction of pop epidemiology and professional medicine. The problem with Where the Stress Falls is, in fact, that there is not a whole lot of stress in evidence. There is a played-out feel about the book, whose serious critical reflections are increasingly rambling and diffuse, and whose many incidental pieces seem, more than anything, like advertisements for Sontag’s status as a cultural icon: answers to French questionnaires about the role of intellectuals, for example, and self-flattering ruminations on being translated. (“You might say I’m obsessed with translations. I think I’m just obsessed with language.” What writer isn’t?)

  This exhaustion is even more marked in the collection that was published after Sontag died, in 2004, called At the Same Time, which includes the now-notorious speech in which she seems to have plagiarized her observations about hypertext: the ultimate mark of creative exhaustion. But a critical tendency does emerge. The vast majority of these late and ostensibly critical pieces are encomia to, and sometimes eulogies for, a long list of European (preferably Mittel-) men: Victor Serge, W.G. Sebald, Robert Walser, Danilo Kiš, Joseph Brodsky, Witold Gombrowicz, Adam Zagajewski. The essays are curiously shorter and more desultory than the early pieces; there is a restless quality even to the project of praise, which Sontag very early on saw as her specialty. (“I don’t, ultimately, care for handing out grades to works of art,” she wrote in a later preface to Against Interpretation. “I wrote as an enthusiast and a partisan.”) Walser, for whom she professes to want to perform her signal service and thereby “bring [him] to the attention of a public that has not yet discovered him,” gets a scant two pages, which end with the kind of banal encomium, a blurb really, that you expect from the harried reviewers in the dailies: “a truly wonderful writer.”

  Compare all this to the forty-two densely packed pages of her thrillingly brilliant 1968 dissection of Godard, for whose reputation she set out to perform a similar service. In that instance Sontag was providing a rigorous and wholly original way of thinking about the complex work of a major young contemporary artist; it was an essay that felt like part of something vital that was happening in the arts. In the Walser piece, by contrast, you get a whiff of Lemon Pledge: she’s dusting off a forgotten tchotchke and putting it back on the very high shelf from which it had fallen. The style, too, is diminished, wearied. The surgical gleam and “aphoristic glitter”—Sontag’s admiring description of Glenway Wescott’s style in The Pilgrim Hawk—of the strong youthful pieces come more and more to be replaced here by expressions of anxious concern for the safety of High Culture. “Is literary greatness still possible?” she frets in the slim essay on Sebald.

  All this suggests, in the end, a certain melancholy fulfillment of a prophecy that Sontag made in her journals when she was in her early twenties. Not long before her twenty-fourth birthday, she wondered to herself which of two roads she might take, and the question she posed suggests that she understood more, then, about the divided nature of both her gifts and her ambitions—the struggle, not least, between genuine innovation and intelligent adulation—than some of her later pronouncements, and projects, might indicate. The answer, too, was prescient. “To philosophize, or to be a culture-conserver?” she wondered in October 1956. “I had never thought of being anything other than the latter.”

  Anyway, what had “greatness” come to mean for Sontag? It was, for a start, almost exclusively identified with Europe. In his preface Rieff acknowledges that for his mother “American literature was a suburb of the great literatures of Europe,” and he is right: Sontag devoted none of her remarkable interpretative energies to significant American writers, either of an earlier time or of her own. The most effusive of her literary encomia, indeed, often come at the expense of the Anglo-American tradition. “When has one heard in English a voice of such confidence and precision, so direct in its expression of feeling, yet so respectfully devoted to recording ‘the real’?” she asks in her piece on Sebald, the last in the string of German novelists whom she exalted—an adulation that started with her life-altering reading of The Magic Mountain as a teenager. (In Reborn Sontag records her meeting with Mann when she was fourteen and he seventy-two, and both were living in Los Angeles; rather typically, she expresses disappointment that the flesh-and-blood person failed to live up to the books.) And as the list of writers whom Sontag does choose to exalt in collections such as Where the Stress Falls also suggests, “greatness” seems to be largely the property of men, and is most likely to be achieved through the writing of novels. And so, in the end, Sontag became a genuine traditionalist—not only a conserver but also, at least in matters of culture, a conservative.

  This desire to be associated with greatness of a kind that is, when all is said and done, exceedingly old-fashioned brings you back to the Sontag of the early journals—to the “ambition,” to the starry-eyed lover of books who reminds Rieff of Lucien de Rubempré. Lucien’s real name is the comically plebeian Chardon, or “thistle”: he has to shake the family tree a bit before the surname that he eventually adopts, with its glamorous aristocratic “de,” falls out. The desire not merely for self-transformation but for a kind of validation that only an association with the highest echelons of culture can bring is one to which Reborn bears ample witness. As his name change indicates, Lucien’s aspirations were social as well as artistic; Sontag, to her great credit, was purely intellectual and cultural in her ambitions. Her desire, twice articulated in these pages, to be “reborn” itself testifies to the fervor of her belief that it was necessary to abandon where she came from in order to get where she wanted to be—an impetus that may well never have found an end point, and that itself may have seemed to her a mark of “greatness.”

  But the obsession with greatness has other implications. There is, you realize, another odd thing about the list of qualities that Sontag associated with literary greatness: it is a list of things that she herself was not. The sense you get here of a profoundly divided identity is, for Rieff, entirely consonant with his mother’s taste for transformation, the lifelong effort to “remake herself.” Anticipating the questions about self-knowledge and identity that such efforts inevitably raise about people, he hints that what in other people could be seen as embarrassment, a kind of covering up, was in Sontag’s case exemplary. Casting her strenuous “jettisoning” of her middle-class, American, Jewish roots (“her social and ethnic context,” as he puts it) as a heroic, nineteenth-century, and even so
mewhat Nietzschean affair—the achievement of a titanic “will”—he cites Fitzgerald on second acts in American lives, a nice way of suggesting that Sontag’s increasing dissociation from things American was the most American thing about her.

  But this pervasive irresolution and desperate desire for transformation can also be ascribed to another factor, to the other of the two strands that unspool in Reborn—not to ambition but to sexuality. In this case, the instability had a marked effect on Sontag’s engagement with politics. I am referring to the issue of the writer’s homosexuality, which she discussed forthrightly enough in her private musings, but about which she remained curiously reticent even when such reticence was no longer expected of important left-wing intellectuals—indeed, when to come out of the closet would have been an affirmation of a certain kind of cultural bona fides.

  It is a measure of the intimidating power of Sontag’s mystique that comparatively little has been made over the years of the refusal by this most public of public intellectuals to engage, in her speeches and her essays, with the pressing issues raised particularly by the AIDS crisis and the political and cultural controversies that it generated throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It says something that when Sontag did write about homosexuality, it was in a work of fiction: the now-famous short story “The Way We Live Now,” first published in The New Yorker in November 1986. (It’s a story about men, about male homosexuals and their experience: a suggestive displacement.) Any notion that she might have connected the dots between her sexual nature and her public utterances on power and justice tended to be cast as a vulgar parochialization, a crass infringement upon her citizenship in the wider republic of letters. Rieff, as we know, acknowledged that his mother “avoided to the extent that she could, without denying it, any discussion of her own homosexuality.” Much depends on that lawyerly “without denying it.” Sontag’s passivity in this regard may have been the only feeble thing about her; she was, after all, no stranger to controversy. She herself was almost touchingly forthright about her ambiguity, in remarks she made late in life to the editor of Out magazine:

  I grew up in a time when the modus operandi was the “open secret.” I’m used to that, and quite OK with it. Intellectually, I know why I haven’t spoken more about my sexuality, but I do wonder if I haven’t repressed something there to my detriment. Maybe I could have given comfort to some people if I had dealt with the subject of my private sexuality more, but it’s never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody’s in drastic need. I’d rather give pleasure, or shake things up.

  The passage is wholly typical. Apart from the characteristic tension between the mind (“Intellectually, I know why”) and the heart, and a certain awkwardness reflected in the stiffness and the circuitousness of the language (“I do wonder if I haven’t repressed something there”), the statement represents yet another triumph of that ferocious intellect at the expense of the realm of feelings. Note the reflexively disdainful dismissal of any possibility that she might have spoken publicly about issues relating to homosexuality as a merely sentimental gesture, a treacly project of “giving comfort.”

  But as we know, Sontag certainly wasn’t above giving comfort to groups that she saw as oppressed, and didn’t disdain making large and dramatic public gestures meant to validate the rights, and the humanity, of certain minorities. About the citizens of Bosnia, that province of Mitteleuropa that became one of her intellectual homelands, about Europe and its political outrages, Sontag never ceased to speak, with her usual crispness and a smart, outraged passion. All this was deeply admirable. But finally there was something familiar about the way in which she championed the foreign over the domestic, the idealized identity rather than the core identity. Intellectually I wanted to go. As we know, she went; and to be sure, there is a kind of touching grandeur to the famous folie of her producing Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo under siege, which, whatever else it may have achieved, certainly gave comfort.

  My point is not to correct Sontag politically; nor do I want to denigrate the significant positive effects of her political arguments and activities. Everyone, after all, is self-interpreting and self-inventing—writers and artists more than most. Sontag was a true cosmopolitan, and that is an achievement not only of morality but also of imagination. But cosmopolitanism, too, is a set of choices, and Sontag’s choices in the realm of politics strikingly resemble her choices in the realm of literature and culture. At a certain point you have to ask why there was this unquenchable need to comfort, this limitless sympathy, for Bosnians but not for lesbians.

  In the end, it was Sontag herself who gave us the most useful metaphor for understanding her. The key is to be found in The Volcano Lover, a work whose ambivalent seesawing between two crucial centuries, between two irreconcilable worldviews, tells us more than anything else she wrote about the uneasy divisions in Sontag herself.

  The novel is an unusual take on a famous story: the love affair between Emma Hamilton and Admiral Nelson. It is told primarily through the eyes of Emma’s cuckolded husband, Sir William Hamilton, the great collector of classical antiquities who, as British envoy to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, in Naples, had the pick of the splendid works that emerged from the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum; these helped to create the great craving for all things classical (and neoclassical) that marked the end of the eighteenth century. A good deal of the book is devoted to brilliant ruminations on the nature and the psychology of collecting, a passion apparently shared by the Sontag-like narrator who, like the narrator of In America, hovers obtrusively over the opening of the novel. “I’m seeing,” this disembodied voice says, during a visit to what seems to be a flea market,

  I’m checking on what’s in the world. What’s left. What’s discarded. What’s no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else … there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I would want. Want to rescue. Something that speaks to me. To my longings.

  As we know, a taste for “checking on what’s in the world,” to say nothing of aesthetic rescue missions, constituted a significant part of Sontag’s critical project. Hamilton’s own characterization of the point of his activities—“To surround oneself with enchanting and stimulating objects, a superfluity of objects, to ensure that the sense will never be unoccupied, nor the faculty of imagination left unexercised”—reminds you even more strongly of the author, with her frenetic desire to be aesthetically stimulated, occupied, exercised. The sense of a strong identification is palpable. Not surprisingly, this novel was the closest to a real literary success that her fiction ever achieved.

  The metaphor of the collector is the perfect one for Sontag. Her impressive sympathy for Hamilton, with his great hunger for inanimate objects, explains so much about her—the unbelievable avidity, the impossibility of satiety, the need to possess it all, to know “everything.” And it provides, too, another explanation for her incessant promotion, toward the end of her career, of “greatness”: like all good collectors, she wanted you to know how precious her objects were, how much they were worth. Small wonder that some of her most intense aesthetic enthusiasms were inspired by collectors: William Hamilton; Walter Benjamin, in his library and in the arcades; Godard. She wrote feelingly about the latter’s “hypertrophy of appetite for culture (though often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements); they proceed by voraciously scavenging in culture, proclaiming that nothing is alien to their art.” It would be hard to think of a better description of Sontag herself.

  As it proceeds, The Volcano Lover moves away from the eighteenth century, from the cool acquisitive gaze of the Enlightenment, to the grand passions of the Romantic century that followed. (The book’s coy subtitle is “A Romance.”) In the novel, headlong passions are represented by two narrative threads, one “personal” and one “political,” that become intertwined. The first is the adulterous love of Nelson and Emma (who abandons, you might say,
the love of the old for the love of the new—the elderly Hamilton for the war hero Nelson); the second is an ongoing series of references to the violent revolutions with which the eighteenth century ended—in particular, the brief republican revolution in Naples in 1799, which resulted in the short-lived overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy. Nelson, on orders from London, gave the royalist regime military support, as Hamilton gave diplomatic support. (Emma, for her part, was the bosom friend of the queen, Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette.) With Nelson’s aid, the republic was soon overthrown and the repressive monarchy was reestablished.

  But if the novel moves you, it is—as sometimes occurs in Sontag’s writing—because of something that happens between the lines. Everything about Hamilton, about the collector, is wonderful: the evocation of what it is like to live a life given to intellectual and aesthetic pursuits, the rich sense that Sontag gives of what it’s like to “discover what is beautiful and to share that with others,” an activity that Hamilton passionately defends as “also a worthy employment for a life.” And yet against all narrative and logical expectation, Sontag ends by wrenching the novel (and the reader’s sympathy) away from Hamilton, who, we perceive, will not be the hero. That role, it turns out, is given to a person who comes late on the scene: another historical figure, Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, a Neapolitan aristocrat and poet who sided with the republican rebels and was executed by the restored Bourbons as the exhausted century ended, in August 1799. The book ends with her musings at the moment of her death—reflections that comprise a stunning rejection of the character, and indeed the values, that Sontag has so feelingly evoked throughout the book. “Did he ever have an original thought,” Pimentel furiously wonders about Hamilton,