Stories

by Susan Sontag

  “To the National Association of Mental Health, to Radio Free Europe (sending beams of hope behind the Iron Curtain), to the League of Women Voters, to the NAACP (for helping speed the integration of our two great races), to the National Convention of Christians and Jews, to the Girl Scouts of America, to the Bahá’í Temple in Chicago, to the University of Vermont (the college of my choice)—I haven’t forgotten the TVA or the Book-of-the-Month Club, except that they don’t need my help—to all the bodies which contribute to the way of life distinctly American, I would give generously, if I could I would leave ten thousand dollars to each;

  “To my children, who must be grown by now and have certainly forgotten their wayward mother—Jim Jr., Mary, and little Willums, the baby—I leave a mother’s blessing and my aquarium, which my own mother has faithfully kept for me (or so she promised) since I left home to marry your father, if the fish have not all died;

  “To my former husband Jim, in the hopes that he has long since forgiven me, all my policies, fully paid up, with the Equitable Life Insurance Company;

  “To Inspector Jug, my contempt, this not being intended to reflect on the honor of policemen and detectives generally;

  “To Mr. Obscenity, the ingratitude he richly deserves.

  “(Signed) Laura Flatface Johnson Anderson.”

  Anderson was Arthur’s last name.

  At the Easy Come Easy Go Funeral Home on Las Madrinas Boulevard a crowd of mourners gathered. Arthur, flustered by the unexpected turnout, sped off unnoticed by a side door, later returning with a large carton of sugar cones and four gallons of vanilla ice cream. He loaded the cones with ice cream, three at a time, and distributed them among the guests. A photographer was circulating about. Several mourners concealed their cones when they saw their picture being taken.

  Among the mourners were to be seen a monocled figure, somewhat downcast in mien, attended by a burly man in a squashed porkpie hat. “What a waste,” the man with the monocle kept muttering. “What a damned waste.” When Arthur came around with a cone for the monocled man, he waved it aside haughtily, then stalked from the room. Snatching the now dripping cone from Arthur’s hand, the man in the porkpie hat raced after him. “Rude bastards, aren’t they?” whispered some of the mourners, relatives of Arthur’s, who had never approved of his marriage but had hastened to the funeral.

  In the back of the funeral parlor, a sturdy man—graying at the temples—sat alone, weeping into a large yellow handkerchief.

  Just as the cremation was about to start, the weeping man lurched to the guardrail and grabbed Arthur by the collar.

  “I’m Jim Johnson, you know. Her first husband.” Then he broke down utterly. “It’s hers,” he said, his words broken by sobs and muffled by the handkerchief that covered his face and to which he referred. “Did you ever know that she loved yellow?”

  “No,” said Arthur sadly. Perhaps Arthur would have been a little less sad if he had known that this fondness for yellow was an item about Miss Flatface that not even Mr. Obscenity, urbane and sensually observant as he was, had guessed.

  With a manly gesture of tenderness, Arthur threw his arm around Jim. Together they knelt in silence as the body was consumed. Up in heaven, Miss Flatface watched approvingly. May she be pardoned if she gloated a little. It may be that none of us is ever wholly known. But who among us has been loved so well?

  Take a deep breath. Don’t attempt anything just yet, you’re not ready. When will you be ready? Never never never.

  That means I must start now.

  Don’t start, don’t even think of it, it’s too difficult. No, it’s too easy.

  Let me start, it’s already started, and I have to catch up.

  Not like that, you oaf. Perched on the chair’s edge, that’s no way to start. Sit all the way back.

  Don’t cool me down, can’t you see I’m already off and running? Taking a deep breath, floated by feeling … the proper implements at hand. Pen, pencil, typewriter, computer?

  You know you’ll wreck everything, don’t you. These things take time. Ground has to be prepared. The others alerted to your coming.

  My intrusion, you mean. My demands, entreaties.

  You have a right, I admit that. Take a deep breath.

  My right to breathe? Thanks. How about my right to have a hemorrhage? I won’t be stopped, stanched, bandaged. Let me try. Just don’t pay attention while I try.

  Act I, Scene 2. Brow furrowed, palms moist, Tatyana sits down at the escritoire in her bedroom to write Eugene a letter. After the salutation, she stalls. How to proceed, when, after all, they have met only once, a few evenings ago, downstairs, and from her shy vantage point at the windowsill in the conservatory, though she followed him everywhere with her gaze, she could hardly lift her eyes from the gleaming buttons on his jacket? That rush of warmth: she wants to declare something. She gets up and asks her nurse to prepare some tea. Nanny brings fudge cakes, too. Tatyana frowns and sets to work again. She pictures him against a background of air, and he becomes slimmer, denser, more remote. It’s a declaration of love she wants to declare. She begins to sing.

  The wind is rattling the shutters, and Eugene’s scratchy quill pen moves swiftly over the paper like a small fish waving its tiny fin. “Dearest Father, there are many things I have long waited to tell you but never dared to utter to your face. Perhaps I shall find the courage in this letter. In a letter, perhaps, I can be brave.” By starting thus Eugene would delay as long as he can what he means to say. This will be, is trying to be, a letter of denunciation. It will be very long. He throws some wood on the fire.

  The night before Dumane’s execution by hanging: after the special meal, and to the accompaniment of the hymns and freedom songs his comrades in neighboring cells will sing throughout the night to comfort him. Dumane is sitting on the cement floor of his cell, nine by twelve, knees drawn close to his chest, paper on his knees, stump of pencil clenched between three lacerated fingers of his left hand—they have broken his right hand—slowly, laboriously printing out his last written words. “When you read this I will be dead. You must be brave. I am calm. Mbangeli and I die confident that our sacrifice will not be in vain. Do not grieve too long for me. I want you to remarry. Comfort Granny. Kiss the children.” There was more to it than that, eked out in tottering capitals, but these were the salient points. The letter ends, “P.S. My darling daughter, remember always that your father loves you and wants you to grow up to be just like your mother. Dearest son, please take care of your mother, who will need you, and do your best at school until you are ready to take your place in our just struggle.”

  Think of it, all those artless letters dashed off between bouts of tormentingly slow composition of the intricate, severe novels and essays that had made her quickly famous, and now a two-volume collection of her letters has come out, which, they say, may be the finest writing she ever did. It’s not only her spirited sentences that enchant; everybody is moved by the portrait of the idyllic loving family from which she sprang. Is it possible such united families still exist? Even now? Nobody knows about the embittered letters to her sister that the widower burned in the barbecue. The world is tired of disillusionment, of unseemly revelations, the world is famished for models of probity. Our world. No one would ever know her as he did, would ever know how valiant she was during the last months of her terrible illness, when the brain tumor gnawed at her language, and he took to writing letters for her, from her, the letters she would have written if she still could. As the guardian of her reputation, now he can be inside the skin of her work in a way she had never let him be while she was alive. He will be exigent, as she was. Somebody, but this professor isn’t distinguished enough, has embarked on a biography: he hasn’t decided whether or not to cooperate. A newspaper correspondent in the Far East writes him a maudlin letter about “the irreparable loss to literature.” He replies, a correspondence ensues. Could this be an old lover of hers? From Hong Kong arrives a packet of her letters, sixty-eight of them, d
one up in red string. These he reads with astonishment. Posthumous shock: this is not the woman he knew.

  Act I, Scene 2. Tatyana gulps down the fresh glass of tea which Nanny brings. Slipping her left hand inside her blouse, she rubs her thumb against her downy shoulder. She has barely begun the letter. The rush of ecstasy in declaring something should be its own reward, but no, there is already the need for an answer. “You didn’t look at me,” Tatyana has written on the first page. And in the middle of the second page, “I am writing you now to ask if you ever think of me.” Then she weeps, and (not in the poem or the opera—no, in real life) begins the letter again. In the opera there is a gush of feeling that floats her through to the end.

  Here I am, with my irrevocable feelings, at least they feel irrevocable, and it is clear that all this could well not have happened. We did not have to meet.

  We met because there had been a fire, nothing serious, in the six-story tenement where I have the great fortune to have found a rent-stabilized apartment. A drowsy pot-smoker on the fifth floor ignited his horsehair sofa. Smoke, black acrid smoke; nothing serious. I was shivering on the street, coatless, and you were feeding nickels into a vending machine for the Times. Seeing me staring at you, you inquired about the fire. Nothing serious. We went past the fire engines to have coffee across the street. That was last January, now I am perishing from seriousness. Why did you leave me? Don’t you mind how coldly he treats you? What is this white paper outspread on my desk? I have sat down to write you a letter, do you think you could love me again, but perhaps I won’t.

  The letter that was never sent, ghost of.

  The letter that never arrived, two more sorts of ghosts. The letter that is lost (in the mail). The letter that was not written, but she said she wrote one and that it must have gotten lost (in the mail). You can never trust the mail. You can never trust the mailer.

  To write at all is to say … all. An act of ardor. That is why she hesitates, while she goes on writing letters in her head. But a letter in the head is a letter, too. It is told that Artur Schnabel used to practice in his head.

  Act I, Scene 2. “I write to you,” Tatyana has begun, begun again—she’s found the cadence. “No more confession is needed, nothing’s left to tell. I know it’s now in your discretion with scorn to make my world a hell.”

  The taper on the escritoire is flickering. Or is the moon, the quivering moon, becoming brighter?

  Go to sleep, my darling, murmurs the old nurse.

  “Oh, Nanny. Oh oh oh …” But she will not seek consolation on her dear, kind Nanny’s breast.

  There, there, my darling …

  “Nanny, I’m stifling, open the window.” The musty old crone moves to obey. “Nanny, I’m chilled, bring me a coverlet.” She pauses at the window, perplexed. “Oh oh oh …”

  Let me sing to you, my darling.

  “No, Nanny, it is I who must sing. In my girlish treble. Leave me, Nanny, my darling old Nanny, I must sing …”

  This is a letter that breaks the bad news. I don’t know how to begin. It didn’t seem as bad when it first started. We were quite hopeful. The situation got worse only toward the end. I hope you will accept this as best you can. I hate to be the bearer of, etc.

  Why people don’t write letters any more. (Much to be said about this, without ever mentioning the telephone.) People just don’t want to take the time, what proves to be a great deal of time, because they lack confidence. Pen poised over the sheet of blank paper, they hesitate. The initial moment of exuberance refuses to translate fluently, rapidly into a voice that meets the standards of … what standards? More hesitations. They make a draft.

  And then letters seem so—well, one-sided. Or lacking in velocity. One is too impatient for the answer.

  The bad news is worse now. This is real bad news, the kind that invites ceremoniousness. He wrote to console me in a florid formal diction that I found heartrending.

  Unlike lovers, unlike best friends, children and parents cannot revel in or despair at the thought that they did not have to have met. And don’t necessarily have to part, except when they do. Eugene is getting closer to what he wants to say. “You have been generous, Father, and clearly think of yourself as having the best intentions toward me. Do not think me ungrateful for the monthly stipend you have provided since I graduated from Cadet School. But as you have acted according to your own principles, I must henceforth act in accord with mine.” A frigid letter—the tone he is seeking is a kind of opaque sincerity—that will turn into a passionate, violent one.

  The Hong Kong Letters, as the widower dubbed them, disclosed a relationship lasting nearly a decade whose inventive lechery he would never have dreamed his wife capable of. Their sexual transports are graphically recalled, as is her facility at giving herself full pleasure when they are apart at any moment, even fully clothed, in public (chatting at a cocktail party, giving a reading), if she had something to press herself against discreetly, with the merest thought of the rough pleasure they gave each other. And “he”—always “he,” strewn respectfully throughout the letters: “he” and his endearingly limited needs, his protective asexual presence, outside whose lull she feared she could not write. Christ! Was that what his uxorious ardor was, for her? The conjugal drone? He would show his fangs now—it is never too late for a crime of passion. He purchases a plane ticket for Hong Kong.

  And the forty-three-year-old salaryman from Osaka on the crippled jumbo jet now circling wildly as it loses altitude, plunging toward the mountain, who is able to master the white-hot blast of animal terror and pull a sheet of paper from the pad inside his briefcase, he too, like Dumane, is writing a farewell letter to his wife and children. But he will have three minutes only. Other passengers are screaming or moaning; some have dropped to their knees to pray as the overhead bins rain parcels and luggage and pillows and coats on their heads. His legs braced against the seat in front of him to keep from being pitched into the aisle, with his left arm, cradling, clutching the briefcase on which he writes, rapidly but legibly, he enjoins his children to be obedient to their mother. To his wife he declares that he regrets nothing—“we’ve had a full life,” he writes—and requests that she accept his death. He is signing as the plane turns upside down, he is stuffing the letter in his jacket pocket when he is hurled past his seatmate against the window, head first, and smashed into the mercy of unconsciousness. When his broken body is recovered on the cedared slopes among the more than five hundred others, the letter is found, delivered by a red-eyed J.A.L. official to his wife, published on the first page of the newspapers. As one, all of Japan dissolves in tears.

  Her letters were so cozily aligned with loneliness. Separation became a value, the occasion and justification for writing letters.

  This, from one of her letters to me:

  “Soon after that I stayed a month on a lavender-scented island off the Dalmatian coast. I found a room to rent in a fisherman’s house and fellow-tourists I liked, with whom I spent much of my time: scuba diving from a boat with a four-horsepower outboard engine we hired, picnicking on broiled silver mackerel and freshly baked flat loaves of bread called lepinja on the pine-shaded rocks of a peninsula, recounting the lives we led elsewhere during long evenings in the café at the port. It was I who left first, before they scattered to Houston, London, Munich; and as the steamer pulled away from the jetty I waved more energetically. ‘Write!’ I shouted. ‘Write!’

  “The first one I met again was the lawyer from Texas, whom I saw the following spring in Geneva; we had exchanged many letters. ‘You shouted “write,” ’ he teased me, ‘as though you thought we were abandoning you. But it was you who decided to leave us, to move on.’ My pride was stung. I have not written him since.”

  Again to me (a fragment): “… not to be taken as lack of trust or withdrawal. Or as rejection. One lives so badly when one is afraid to live alone.”

  To another, not me, she permits herself the lyrical tremolo.

  With his four dromeda
ries Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira traversed the world and admired it. He did what I would like to do. If I had three dromedaries! Or two! I am writing this astride the steed at hand. I am seeing the world, the marvels therein. It is what I’ve always wanted to do, in my one and only life. But, meanwhile, I want to keep in touch. Do want to keep. In touch.

  With you. And you.

  “You will be glad to hear, Father,” Eugene adds, “that I have paid off my gambling debts.” He means to be sarcastic, but perhaps he is trying to placate the old man. What does he care, what does he care, is he still seeking his father’s approval? This part, where the failed poet indicates how he has not misspent his life, should be treated presto, in the manner of a note challenging someone to a duel.

  Actually, one other passenger is writing as the plane falls—a fourteen-year-old girl who, returning to Tokyo after being treated by her aunt in Osaka to a joyous weekend of Takarazuka performances and about to start the thank-you note to her aunt when the pilot makes his first hoarse announcement, lifts her pen, shudders, then plunges it down to the paper to write instead: I’m scared. I’m scared. Help. Help. Help.