Essays: Writer and commentator Susan Sontag's final collection of essays.
At the Same Time By Susan Sontag Hamish Hamilton, 235pp. £18.99.
Susan Sontag died in December 2004, aged 71, after her third and final battle with cancer. She is known first as a public intellectual, of the kind produced in the United States and parts of Europe in the 20th century, and as a principled political activist and writer in the arenas of American foreign policy and international persecution of fellow-writers. She was a cultural commentator, a literary critic of distinction, a successful novelist and a figure of immense charisma, presence and sometimes unexpected humour. She once delightfully told a young man who asked what she was famous for that it was the white streak in her dark hair.
This book of essays, addresses and short pieces is, perforce, her last, although that was not her intention. It is difficult not to read some of the pieces as valedictory, but of course her style often sounded valedictory; a high, expostulatory, aphoristic tone dedicated to persuading her readers of the virtue and beauty of a chosen writer, or of the dangerous foolishness of certain political actions. These pieces illuminate a number of her concerns, laid out in sections dealing with a number of favoured writers, with post-9/11 America, with photography and photographed torture, and a final, soaring set of pieces affirming the value and importance of literature.
Sontag kept away from academia, and has some harsh words here for academic literary criticism, which she describes as " . . . overwhelmed by a plethora of notions expressing the keenest hostility to the very project of literature itself". Her own project is discovery, explication, clarity; she loves to tell us about someone new, undeservedly ignored, and to give us the reasons why we should explore her protege. In this volume, her choices are Leonid Tsypkin, Anna Banti and Halldór Laxness, for the novels Summer in Baden-Baden, Artemisia, and Under the Glacierrespectively. Also included is a long essay on Victor Serge, a fascinating character who participated in the Russian revolution, only to turn against Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky in turn, and become one of the lone left-wing voices in 1930s Europe warning about the collapse and corruption of the Soviet enterprise.
The effect of Sontag's persuasive explorations of these writers is to make the reader long to read what she has espoused, surely literary criticism at its best. But we also learn a great deal about the writers in the course of her painstaking exposition of their lives: Leonid Tsypkin being persecuted by the state apparatus in the USSR, finally being fired even from the demoted job he did to keep him alive; Anna Banti in the hills above Florence as the Nazis invaded in August 1944; Victor Serge dying of a heart attack in the back seat of a taxi in Mexico City. When she takes someone on, she takes them fully on. (Heavily involved in the campaign against the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, she told Christopher Hitchens: "You know, I think about Salman every second. It's as if he was a lover".)
SONTAG INCURREDdisproportionate approbrium for her initial reaction to the events of September 11th, 2001. She was in Berlin at the time of the attacks, and distance from her beloved city of New York dimmed the horror and pity of what had happened to the victims. She published a short piece in the New Yorker which railed against the sentimentality and danger of the rhetoric being used by public figures in the aftermath (she made an exception of Rudi Giuliani). "Let's by all means grieve together. But let's not be stupid together". This piece, missing the genuine empathy with the victims that she felt on her return to New York, provoked a terrifying response - vilification, demonisation, death threats. It is interesting to find in this volume two further pieces on the subject, one written a few weeks after the first, another a year later. In both, her pity and sorrow at the human cost of the attacks are clear, and her analysis of the political use to which they are being put incisive and prophetic.
Sontag's On Photography(1977) fundamentally altered perceptions of how photography influences our ways of seeing the world, and affects its subjects. The latest of many controversies surrounding her is the posthumous furore generated by her partner Annie Leibovitz's recently published photographs of the dying and dead Sontag, photographs that raise issues of privacy, consent, taboo and ritual. Two essays in this book deal with photography, one a short collection of aphorisms that constitute a kind of coda to On Photography, the other a masterful analysis of the infamous Abu Ghraib images of American soldiers torturing Iraqis in their custody: "America has become a country in which the fantasies and practice of violence are seen as good entertainment, fun".
The World as Indiais a characteristically kaleidescopic Sontag outing, on the subject of literary translation, in which she takes us from St Jerome, first translator of the Bible, through Friedrich Schleiermacher, who believed translation must be literal, to Walter Benjamin, who believed it must not. Along the way, she outlines the reasons why English is the new Latin, one of them being that English was chosen as the international language of civil aviation in the 1920s, another that the predominant language of internet search engines is English, another the pervasive influence of linguistic colonialism and its unexpected benefits for, say, the employees of call centres in India.
THE FINAL PIECESin this volume are staunch defences of literature, the role of which is "to extend our sympathies; to educate the heart and mind; to create inwardness; to secure and deepen the awareness (with all its consequences) that other people, people different from us, really do exist". One of the lovely incidental pieces of information we get is a list of the books read by the young Susan Rosenblatt in her Arizona childhood: Lamb's T ales of Shakespeare, Gulliver's Travels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities. And The Sorrows of Young Wertherat 10 years old! The freedom literature gave her as a child, " . . . to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck" is something she conjures with great skill and gratitude, that sense of blessed escape familiar to all of us who took refuge from the endless difficulties of childhood in glorious books.
Sontag's political thought is distinguished by common sense. Her reflections on relations between the US and Europe, outlined in Literature is Freedom, are models of sober analysis by someone with a foot in both camps. Her Europhile tendencies and loathing of the Bush administration do not blind her to the qualities in American culture that she cherishes - energy, innocence, abundance, diversity, tolerance. Although she preferred to describe herself as a story-teller rather than a cultural ambassador, the latter was a role she fulfilled with great intelligence and a profound sense of public duty.
It is sad to think that this vibrant, interrogative, angular voice is now silent. There will be events and moments in years to come when some of us will wonder "what would Sontag have made of this?", and long for a challenging, high-toned, resonant contribution to the debate. But alas, in vain.
Catriona Crowe is a senior archivist in the National Archives of Ireland, and president of the Women's History Association of Ireland.