Stories

by Susan Sontag

  How many demented prejudices still exist against the organization! Obviously, we can’t all look alike—since our members are drawn from several races and are citizens of many countries (we are indeed staunchly internationalist); further, it’s not even common for membership to stay long within the same family. Take my own case. Lee is a member, of course. But our younger daughter has so far shown neither the temperament nor the interests that indicate a future member. We’re a little disappointed, to be sure—Lee more than myself. I, in my present mood, should be rejoicing at my daughter’s good fortune.

  A small mercy. At least no one is born into the organization! To have such a choice assigned to one by birth, to have one’s childhood paralyzed by such morbid predilections, would be too oppressive. There is this much humanity in our leaders’ otherwise rigorous severity: they leave us to find the organization ourselves.

  Lee is late today. Maybe I should start the dinner.

  Whatever induces anyone to join, you ask. Idealism—which goes without saying. And other motives that are less noble, but not ignoble, either. For some, it is the social advantages I’ve mentioned. A member knows he or she can present our credentials to another member anywhere in the world and be offered aid and hospitality, for members consider that they constitute one family. That’s no small asset, the world being the dangerous place it is, to have helpful relatives to call on wherever you find yourself. For some, it is the number of distinguished writers, scholars, scientists, actors, political figures, and so on, who have been members; those who join us feel they are entering a select society. For some, it is the moving story of our hardships; suffering has great prestige among those who are drawn to us.

  What attracted me, I think, was all these reasons. Even as a child, I had the psychological predisposition that marks a potential member. From the age of nine, I wanted to be a writer. Since I never did find the freedom to write with my own voice, I entered a profession that puts me at the service of other writers. Service, being useful to the community and to the highest ideals, has always seemed to me what made life worth living. But no vocation—not even that of the writer, exalted as was the conception I had of it—seemed to exhaust my hunger for the truth, my wish to lead not just a good but a morally intense life.

  Also, as I remember, I was fascinated by the idea of being different. Dozing off in the grade-school civics class, I longed to have been born a Jew; I fancied myself left-handed; I imagined myself, grown up, as a homosexual, as a monk or a nun, as a bomb-throwing revolutionary; I dreamed about Robin Hood. While still young, I’d heard vaguely of the organization. (Here, where branches are numerous, who hasn’t?) But I never thought of joining until I was nearly grown, mainly because I’d never actually met a member: personal recruitment, of course, is the chief method by which the movement gains new adherents. People rarely make application to join us on the basis of reading or hearsay alone.

  Sometimes one’s first contact with a member—if he or she is disagreeable or stupid—drives the prospective candidate away. This nearly happened to me, for the first member I met, a plaintive-voiced, sandy-haired man with spectacles who had recently married my father’s young sister, was the dreariest kind of member, the kind who turns up regularly at meetings and pays his dues, as if nothing more were to be expected of him. Uncle George’s lack of seriousness was already suggested by his very willingness to marry into a family of nonmembers. My well-off suburban parents, who prided themselves on being enlightened, had promptly yielded when my aunt brought home her fiancé. They even swallowed comment on his table manners and short-sleeved sports shirts. He thought he was honoring us; the family thought it was being very modern and spirited in accepting him. Eager at the prospect of knowing a member (I was fifteen), I besieged him with questions. He evaded them all with a trite boast, a complacent shrug. I decided that he must be bound by a rule of secrecy or afraid to confide in me, thinking I was a spy for my family, sent to interrogate him. Later, disillusioned, I realized that the most likely explanation of George’s vagueness was that he took his membership lightly.

  Once, I described George to the organizer, berating policies so slack that such a person could have been admitted. A naïve complaint: typical of the mentality of members. Even after belonging for many years, my pride in the organization, my wish or belief that members must be better than other people, remained intact.

  I was almost eighteen when I met my second member, a professor at the university where I was enrolled. Long before knowing anything about him, I was drawn to Cranston. He wore three-piece suits with leather elbow patches and had a peculiarly arrogant manner on the lecture platform, for which, with the pathos of youth, I admired him. He was balding fast. Though at the time he must have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine, he looked to be in his early forties at least. This internationally acclaimed expert in his abstruse field came from a poor and uneducated family of butchers, dressmakers, and cops. Years of near-starvation, while he was putting himself through college and graduate school by his own efforts, had left him extremely thin. And when, through a classmate’s gossip, I found out that he was a member, I thought I’d divined the secret of his austerity and dedication.

  Of course, I didn’t immediately dare bring my personal interest in the organization to Cranston. I was shy. And I wanted to offer him something more serious than curiosity. Before approaching him, I read up on the history of the organization. Being uninitiated, I understood little of what I’d read; but on the basis of that, I proposed doing a term paper on the organization’s tenets of belief in the early nineteenth century. Cranston’s assistant reluctantly approved my topic. The next step was to get to see Cranston himself, no easy matter, since he always hurried away after his lectures. I tried to devise a suitable question I might put to him—I mean, a question that was neither distasteful in its ignorance nor impertinent in its maturity.

  “Would you agree that the reason the organization’s members cluster together is not snobbery or clannishness but to be able to aid each other in the most difficult circumstances?” I blurted out at Cranston in the corridor one day after class. My pretext was still that paper for his course. “We preach a universal brotherhood,” he replied drily. I’d been rebuffed, and I respected him for that. I came at him again, undiscouraged, a week later. This time I’d typed out a list of questions, which I thrust into his hands. “All this for a term paper?” he said, frowning. He had long, thin fingers with beautiful pale, tapering nails.

  “Not exactly, sir,” I said. “It’s really more of a personal interest. And I thought that since you … I mean, I’ve heard that you …”

  I suppose another reason I was drawn to the organization (I should mention them all) is that my mother so disapproved of my joining. It was all right for my aunt to marry George, she was no bigot, etc.—so she said. I knew that it was because she had never liked any of her in-laws. Convinced that she’d married down in settling for my father, she thought it fitting for her husband’s sister to marry even further down, by choosing George; but not for her spoiled, precocious only child—who was going to be a great writer—to get mixed up with that tawdry, suspect, clannish crew. And besides, it was dangerous. Weren’t some of their activities illegal? I enjoyed defying her; at last she had a reason to worry about me. (I’d been a far too docile child.) Years later, she herself became a member. This embarrassed me.

  I could see, to my surprise, that Cranston had taken a sudden liking to me. He seized my elbow awkwardly. “What’s your name?”

  Cranston invited me to his one-room apartment near the university, and started to make some instant coffee on the hot plate. Then the cord broke. We talked for several hours that day, the first of many conversations. He took down rare leather-bound books from the seventeenth century and showed them to me. (One was called Oceania.) How flattered I was! Here was a man such as I had imagined members of the organization to be—dignified, articulate, reserved, yet (nobody can hide that sort of thing) inflamed with a great passi
on.

  I hadn’t yet met the type of member, all too common, who becomes ashamed of belonging to the organization, and conceals it.

  Cranston smiled—for what that was worth. His almost-handsome, skeletal head was handsomer when he didn’t smile; when he did, you noticed that he had trouble with his gums. He started to tell me a little about the organization. Unlike my uncle, Cranston didn’t boast of his affiliation with the movement. His remarks were detached, factual. To him, I was still an outsider, and he wasn’t interested in proselytizing. I sat in a broken armchair, spellbound by his sense of purpose, and longed to share in what inspired him.

  I’d better pass over the stages of my entry into the organization, for I feel myself sliding back into the mood of grateful reverence that brought me into it. Since I’m trying to assemble my reasons for leaving, I should be explaining these—and perhaps, in the telling, fortify my resolution.

  I suppose the main reason is that, despite the close camaraderie that membership supplies, I do feel isolated. It’s difficult to explain, for there are members all around me, and from the organization I have drawn friendships, love affairs, professional contacts, and, nine years ago, a marriage. I’m never alone. Although our movement is numerically very small, no more than the tiniest fraction of the world’s population—in many places the organization has never gained a foothold—it often seems to me that the world is populated only by members. Everywhere I go, and I’ve traveled on three continents, I meet them. Perhaps this is a delusion, part of the special mentality, the unique way of looking at the world, that one adopts upon becoming a member—a kind of protective myopia conferred by initiation. How often has it happened that when I strike up a conversation with a stranger whom I assume to be a nonmember (never, I must admit, without the definite awareness that he is not one of us, an awareness that sometimes heightens our intimacy but often inhibits it), my new acquaintance turns out to be a member. Perhaps he’s concealing it, for reasons of personal convenience, or because he fears some new persecution is afoot.

  Or perhaps he is a lapsed member—at any rate, one who has stopped paying dues and attending meetings. But even so, I can’t help treating him as a member in full standing. For it’s one of the peculiarities of our movement that while we are (or claim to be) scrupulous in screening candidates and admitting new members, we never regard someone as really having left. Even after expulsion, disgraced members are kept track of. They are watched carefully and with a certain solicitude.

  Once, I asked the or ga nizer why the movement remains so attached to its former members. Sentimentality? “We’re well rid of the disaffected,” I said, “the ones who no longer contribute anything to us.” It would be better, I argued, to have clear standards of misbehavior and reliable procedures for severance—as marriage, also a permanent and binding contract, is compatible with the possibility of getting a divorce.

  This conversation took place four years ago, before I was aware of feeling anything other than pride in the organization. The old man had just recovered from his first heart attack; I was polishing my translation of his third collection of polemics. Now it occurs to me that my questions were not disinterested: that I was pleading, in advance, for myself—for the possibility of my own exit.

  I’m not saying it’s not possible to be thrown out of the organization. It is. But only after committing definite, public, and outrageous acts. Some hold that joining another organization is sufficient grounds for expulsion. For others, it’s moving to a country where there are no members—not even a small cell, an embryonic branch. (A minority consider this second tantamount to the first.) Others would expel anyone who denounces the organization or reveals its secrets to nonmembers—while remaining notably indulgent toward indiscretions that don’t carry beyond the movement’s roster. Still, one can’t commit any of these treasonable acts with certainty that expulsion will result. On many occasions, the organizer has surprised rebellious members by his leniency. That’s one reason—not the only one, of course—why I still hesitate to take any particular step. It would be easier if there were precedents to guarantee that at least some steps I might take would have consequences.

  You’ve noticed, I hope, that I’m digressing. The reasons why it’s difficult for me to leave are not identical with the reasons that prompt me to leave; and it’s those I want to explain.

  I mentioned the sense of isolation from which I suffer, despite the nourishing proximity of members all around me. I can’t describe this isolation more accurately than by saying that I have a keen sense of being cut off. But from what? After only twelve years of belonging to the movement, I hardly remember what it was like not to belong. Understand, I’m not denying for a moment the advantages and strenuous privileges of membership. But I know that I lost something upon joining, something I probably couldn’t ever recover if I left, for the organization leaves its mark on you (our teachers proclaim), and besides, I am twelve years older, no longer exactly young. I have, probably, given the best years of my life to the movement.

  To be fair, I must explain that the organization makes no secret of the sacrifices demanded of its members (quite apart from the risk of martyrdom—never quite real to me, since I’m a citizen of a country mercifully untempted, so far, by such a crime). “Merit through suffering” is one of the organization’s slogans, which every applicant is instructed to ponder. (“Deeper and deeper into the books” is another, more obscure slogan, which is studied by some members only, at a later stage of initiation.) Still, I think the organization does minimize some of the sacrifices that membership entails. We are exhaustively instructed about the world’s disfavor and about the high moral demands that the organization’s traditions make upon the members. But no word about the rest of our sacrifices. Have these been overlooked in the discussions? Or concealed? I think not. (Whatever my other complaints, I’m not accusing the leadership of hypocrisy or bad faith.) No, I think that most of our presidents, along with the rank and file, are not even aware of them. The bitterest truth of all.

  I mean, for example, the narrow mode of living that membership fosters. Although our movement was founded by recluses living in underpopulated regions, it has appealed almost exclusively to inhabitants of large cities. It’s as if dry solitude, as in the desert, had been necessary to formulate the ideal or have the experiences that gave birth to the movement, but damp crowding, as in city life, is needed to perpetuate it.

  The elevator has broken down again, so Lee will have to walk up sixteen flights of stairs. The dog has stopped barking in the next apartment. Our neighbors are cooking dinner. Someone nearby is practicing the violin, accompanied by a reckless piano tuner.

  Our members vacation in the country, and occasionally live in barns. But they rarely feel at home there. They dislike working the land, or exploiting nature for purposes of pleasure. In part, this may be explained by the organization’s rule (more a tradition, really) of nonviolence. But it’s not only hunting and fishing—as well as farming and raising animals—that members abjure. All sports, involving as they do an intolerable degree of thoughtlessness and yielding to the body, are, as it were, instinctively avoided by most of us. Members who do go out for football or hunt foxes or sail or parachute-jump or race stock cars or dance the tango or grow wheat seem to be engaged in some astounding, unconvincing, laborious affectation.

  And yet it’s not instinct. For these same persons once—at least as children—boxed and rode horseback and played tennis as freely as anyone else. It’s the style of character produced by membership (more by example, through contact with other members, than by explicit rule) that results in these aversions. The proof is that we’re even proud of our incapacities; we learn to retort, “That’s for the others.”

  It’s the same with the food preferences shared by many of our members. Undoubtedly, when they were young, future members ate spinach and brussels sprouts and cabbages just like everyone else. But after joining, most turn up their noses when a plate of such stuff is place
d before them. “Grass,” they sneer. I can vouch for the fact that it’s not because of some old superstition about the color green—one of the sillier beliefs about us held by nonmembers. Nor is it a lingering religious taboo. The reason we’re a meat-eating group who shy away from vegetables is that we associate a herbivorous diet with mental dullness. And yet, as if to compensate for this aversion, members have a tendency to overeat, and our meals in common are often festive.

  Have you noticed that the reproaches leveled against us, even when justified, are quite contradictory? Some say we’re dirty; others that we’re neurotically clean. (Members will rarely leave a sink full of dirty dishes.) Some say we’re priggish; others that we are too sensual. (We love food. We admire sex.) That’s the genius of the organization: that we are at once so dispersed and so unified, so similar and so disunited. Only this way, probably, could we have survived so many persecutions.

  Well, you may say, go to the country then. Lie in the sun, tan your pale body, do calisthenics, commit adultery, scuba dive, ride a motorcycle, raise dogs, eat lettuce. But it’s not so simple. I do, I do many of these things—without being ostentatious about them in front of other members. But they remain exotic to me. I feel I lack permission. And even if I could give permission to myself, something is wrong as long as I need permission.

  Unfortunately, I’ve never gone off to the country without taking my typewriter along. I always have such a backlog of work.

  Even more stupid than not wholeheartedly enjoying the rural and the carnal is performing these things on principle, with effort. (Effort should be reserved for the struggle to elevate one’s mind and perfect one’s principles.) Still, I continue discreetly to pursue my pathetic projects. I’ve started a garden on our apartment-house roof, where—despite the polluted air—I manage to grow string beans.