Sister Sontag
Valiunas, Algis
W hat's a girl to do if she happens to be brainy and easy on the eyes and hip beyond all reckoning so that nobody can see her pass by without having a shot at her one way or another? Here's what...
...In both cases, ecstatic release from the bondage of an insufferable self proves sheer fantasy...
...promoting boycotts of sexist toymakers (not to be confused with sex toy makers, who provide a vital and liberating service...
...After the first class, Rieff grabbed Sontag's arm and asked her to lunch...
...The veteran of Sarajevo has seen rather more of war than most of her readers have, and the knowledge has marked her...
...Sontag's surprise pronouncement in 1982 that this awaited efflorescence of earthly justice was not going to happen stunned and dismayed the troops...
...The North Vietnamese know perilous decadence when they see it: in 1975 the new rulers of a unified democratic Vietnam proscribed her books...
...As she puts it in "Homage to Halliburton," an essay published in 2001, "When I acknowledge to myself that I'm interested in everything, what am I saying but that I want to travel everywhere...
...And yet it turns out Hippolyte has a hard time distinguishing dream from waking life, and it just may be that he has been confined for some years in a mental institution...
...They did not specify whether this was for unacceptable revisionism or, say, the description in her novel Death Kit of an act of sexual congress performed standing up in the toilet of a moving train by a man and a blind woman who have only just met...
...Will...
...How to think about the whirling spectacle of human misery—particularly if oneself is far removed from war, famine, and pestilence—is the theme of Sontag's new book, Regarding the Pain of Others...
...At its best the story has a sunny amiability lit by admiration for American vim, grit, will, and eagerness for every conceivable novelty...
...Her two early novels The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1967) read very much like a critic's attempt to give life to ideas...
...In Sontag's words, redolent of Nietzschean wisdom, which never sounded more feeble and preposterous, "Freedom is not an inner, psychological something—but more like physical grace...
...Being famous does make for an eventful life...
...yet courage—indeed, the kind one commonly thinks of as the very essence of courage—she was not short of...
...she liked her martinis laced with rocket fuel...
...there is the independent woman of unconquerable brio, roaming the West and adept at the latest art, photography...
...the belle dame sans merci of the literary world...
...Like Richard Halliburton...
...This unwillingness to accept the disagreeable consequences of her moral enthusiasm, coupled with an inability to understand that the American government does not enjoy the same privilege of unbridled public garrulity as do American intellectuals, constitutes a grave intellectual failure...
...Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are No artificial barriers are to be interposed between the person truly alive and the world's vital reality...
...Despite the ravages visited on Sontag by modern French literature—mad frog disease inexorably melts the afflicted brain—she enters her eighth decade in command of formidable powers...
...In the furor that followed, Sontag attempted to re-ingratiate herself with the longtime allies who now scorned her and to repudiate the former enemies who stood ready to welcome her...
...The artist Joseph Cornell constructed a pair of his celebrated boxes as votive offerings...
...womanly voices counter the traditional view of martial splendor...
...Yet certain of her judgments possess a commanding ardor: if you haven't read or seen or heard the works she writes of, you feel compelled to do so as soon as you can, and if you are familiar with them, she makes you want to know them intimately, as she does...
...And it was with just such disgust that she responded in 2001 to the second President Bush, when he reacted to the September 11 terrorist attacks with words of sorrow, consolation, and resolve to root out the evildoers...
...Just to walk down an ordinary street was to brave exploding artillery shells and sniper fire, and few literary types cared to risk their skin for a cause that almost nobody cared about anyway...
...Moynihan's question was a polite way of asking her to put up or shut up...
...Here's what they've called her over the years: the Natalie Wood of the U.S...
...In the 1990s Sontag paid numerous visits to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, then besieged by neo-fascist Serbs and Croats, and by no means a fashionable stopping place for intellectuals eager to stir up popular outrage...
...no one had ever talked to her so passionately, and they were married ten days later...
...George Orwell once said that fellow traveling was playing with fire by people who didn't know the fire was hot...
...It is time, then, to see how near to her aspirations her achievement has come...
...This plea for the nation to exercise its intelligence evinces no intelligence on Sontag's part...
...Nothing is more attractive in a person, but is extremely rare after the age of four...
...Sontag is not bashful about deploring the general lack of interest that most civilized people show toward the genocidal corners of the world...
...besides his collection of pictures and statues by the masters, his foremost passion is Mount Vesuvius, which he climbs repeatedly in order to gaze into its crater...
...I feel not only intellectually remiss but spiritually impoverished for my ignorance of such Sontag passions as the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva...
...Rieff was jettisoned, not without extreme grief, most of it his...
...The poet and legendary drunken fornicator James Dickey proclaimed to all that he had spent a night of love with Sontag—and what a night it had been—and perhaps there had actually been such a night...
...the Japanese puppet theater Bunraku...
...To understand sexuality "as something beyond good and evil, beyond love, beyond sanity...
...No critic who also writes fiction wants to be thought of as just a critic, and Sontag's fiction certainly occupies a significant place in her life's work...
...When not busy cruising the garden spots of the Unfree World, Sontag was empowering the sisterhood back home with accounts of her abortion...
...In America recounts the adventures of a troupe of Polish artists and intellectuals, led by their homeland's premier actress, Maryna Zalezowska, who come to 1870s America primed for limitless freedom, to follow their passions and make themselves anew...
...She contended that even a cursory acquaintance with the historical record would clarify the reasons for these acts of terror and that more would surely follow...
...Although war is perennial as the grass, Sontag refuses to get used to it, and from her pain at the pain of others she has written a fine book, immeasurably more intelligent than Three Guineas, indeed intelligent enough that is just might help rescue antiwar sentiment—and more important, antiwar thought—from the bad-for-children-and-other-living-things crowd...
...These legatees, she writes in the essay that launched her, "Against Interpretation," include most commentators of the arts who ignore the sensuous surface of the work at hand in order to ferret out its hidden meaning...
...Sontag was a caring mother in her own fashion, claiming to have typed her first novel with David on her lap, and taking him to newly Communist Cuba for a four-month summer vacation...
...Zeal remains, but it is modulated, as the need to get things right has superseded the craving to make the biggest possible splash...
...The critical success of Sontag's most recent novel, In America, which won the National Book Award, shows just how impressionable unformed minds can be...
...Her 1966 encomium in Against Interpretation to Jean-Luc Godard's film Vivre sa vie (To Live Her Life) is as detached from reality as only intellectual rapture virtually indistinguishable from outright lunacy can be...
...It is being what, who one is...
...Communism's advocates in the democratic West had to assume their share of the blame for its persistent evil and renounce their blighted creed...
...Yet when she testified before a Senate subcommittee on terrorism and Daniel Patrick Moynihan pressed her on whether the United States should meet violence with violence, Sontag replied that the Rushdie affair was not the kind of thing to go to war over...
...Mary McCarthy called Sontag "the imitation me" and thought her a poor imitation at that...
...This uncontrolled eagerness for nervy jailbreak experience plunges Sontag into fatuity without bottom...
...Sontag's novels, fantasies about and against fantasy, take the long way round to espouse the happiness of vital integrity unhindered by outworn moral compunction...
...We have a robotic president who assures us that America stands tall," Sontag wrote in the New Yorker, dismissing not only the presidential but also congressional and journalistic reactions as "self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions...
...But, she lamented, Americans pay no mind to history...
...A man is a man...
...Edmund Wilson remained steadfastly unimpressed, though he liked her looks...
...Her predilection for the sexual extremes that cut one loose from dull bourgeois confinement animates a larger project: to free men and women to enjoy their brief stay in a meaningless world...
...our glorious camp follower of the French avant-garde...
...That's hard to beat for unabashed inanity, but Sontag takes dearth of judgment to new depths three years later in the signature piece "The Pornographic Imagination" in Styles of Radical...
...The temple of wisdom shone with a glamour that would become frankly erotic as she drew nearer...
...Nine years later, after the birth of a son (the present-day author David Rieff, who at two was rhyming Hegel with bagel) and graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne (husband and son remained behind while she explored the mind of Europe), Sontag decided she could not live the multiple lives she craved while she still had a husband...
...Last January she confronted her seventieth birthday with fervor undiminished and published her sixteenth book soon afterward...
...So all that is necessary for America to avoid the further wrath of Islam is for the heartland ignoramuses to adopt the wise and sensitive politics of Sontag and her ilk...
...Sontag is out to finish what Nietzsche started: not merely to reconcile men to a hard, godless fate, but to make them rejoice in a condition unencumbered by antique religion and metaphysics, which bend the multitudes in plaintive submission...
...One of her characters summarizes the Sontag program thus: "We may well say of sexuality: what a promise of freedom it is, how astonishing that it is not outlawed...
...Her 1995 essay on directing a production of Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, under conditions that would have broken any but the hardiest soul, shows Sontag at her finest, upholding cosmopolitan civilization fragile as a Sevres vase in a sector of Europe reverting to time-honored barbarian folkways...
...that the university had no football team and everyone spent all their time reading the canonical Great Books and thinking great thoughts clOsed the deal...
...In The Volcano Lover, Sontag depicts with masterly sharpness the carnage, savagery, and courage to be found in mass violence...
...Of melancholy temperament, he forgets himself by fervent attention to the rest of the world...
...But when bliss is in short supply, you take it wherever you find it...
...a new Chanel of the arts...
...Relying on Sontag's well-practiced, knee-jerk responses to fashionable opinions, the book is far from serious art...
...life...
...The most appealing portraits of Sontag's artistic heroes and heroines are to be found in the essay collections Under the Sign of Saturn (1980) and Where the Stress Falls (2001), suggesting that wisdom advanced as youth retreated, along with some of youth's polemical outlandishness...
...after reading Sontag's essay on the film, I wish I could see it again today...
...But as Sontag herself recognizes several pages before, the disease burns its way through the affected populations precisely by way of millions of individual moral choices: people who claim to be acting out of something like love—though it is generally not at all that much like love—are doing this to each other...
...Very continental in its provenance, this line of thinking was once considered terribly advanced, but it is now all too familiar, having infected with a mutant democratic strain the minds of millions of our impressionable countrymen...
...The danger to her was real: two Berkeley bookstores were firebombed, and Rushdie's translators in Japan, Italy, and Norway were attacked, one of them fatally...
...During her second year at Chicago, she audited a course taught by the sociologist Philip Rieff, who would make his name with books on Freud and his apostate successors...
...Magnificence counted...
...for once she tells a tale of complicated people and events—aristocrats during the French Revolution and its aftermath—that her didactic impulse does not reduce to chanted formulae...
...Her novels were beguilingly abstruse but sexy...
...At the age of nine she read Les Miserables, the ruin of the factory hand Fatine, reduced to penury and prostitution and selling her beautiful hair, convinced her that the one decent response to the unspeakable industrial dispensation was to become a socialist...
...Not that it will make a difference—or should—to the prosecution of the Hundred Years War against militant Islam that is just beginning and cannot be avoided...
...Following the moral trajectory of Jane Fonda, she went to Hanoi in 1968 and prated formulaically in Esquire about the virtues of her Communist hosts and the evils of the imperialist power prosecuting an unjust war against so nice looking a people...
...Sheremembers thinking "childhood was a terrible waste of time" and "a prison sentence," from which books offered the sole available redemption...
...She wants an end to war—a womanly reaction, in her view, for men do seem to take some peculiar pleasure in this most trying extremity—but she also acknowledges that there is no end in sight...
...Lovers of both sexes filled the erotic vacuum, though in due course women would become the exclusive bunkmates of choice...
...A year later, she read George Eliot's Middle-march and broke down crying upon understanding that she was the lustrous ingenue Dorothea, Rieff the pretender to genius—and husbandly dud—Casaubon...
...It is monstrous," she writes, "to attribute meaning, in the sense of moral judgment, to the spread of an infectious disease?' It does seem unlikely that AIDS is a scourge visited upon the sinful by an angry God...
...This is a book worthy of Sontag's considerable gifts, and one wishes—hopes—there will yet be more like it...
...To Sontag, the old guard was old hat, and she never let the detractors muss her composure...
...She was seventeen, he twenty-eight...
...Although Sontag acknowledges that habitués of pornography and other practitioners of sexual bizarrerie tend to live miserable lives, in her view the finest pornography—need one mention that it is French, of distinguished literary pedigree, and seriously bent?—extends the known boundaries of the human, or more precisely surpasses humanity altogether, by utterly dehumanizing sexual experience...
...that when governments talk tough they are often required to back up their words seemed lost on her...
...Hippolyte, the narrator of The Benefactor, sells his mistress into sexual slavery because he knows she wants a life utterly different from the one she's got...
...One is free, and therefore responsible, when one realizes that things are as they are...
...But the whore's life has rendered Nana authentic and free as she never was before so that she dies a death of profundity and rightness attainable only in French movies...
...I've seen enough films by Godard, Bresson, and Bergman to know I won't feel deprived if I never sit through another...
...She portrayed the United States as a bully throwing his weight around the Middle East, while his vicious midget sidekick, Israel, sank his teeth into tender Arab ankles, and she considered it only just that we got our comeuppance...
...Yet those failures increase the urgency of Sontag's implicit plea to her readers: live, really live, while you have life, for fantasy grants no satisfactions comparable to the genuine pleasures that bodily existence holds for those bold enough to seize them...
...Abel Gance's film, J'accuse Virginia Woolf's polemic, Three Guineas—have failed to inhibit men from doing what men have always done, given the chance: their worst...
...Someone," she writes, "who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans has not reached moral or psychological adulthood...
...While most writers chose discreet silence and many bookstores removed the offending volume, Sontag showed the courage that civilization requires for its defense—up to a point, anyway...
...urging lesbians to stand tall...
...If the obverse of Sontag's sensibility features the pursuit of ecstasy, the reverse is her attempt to comprehend and minister to a world of pain...
...But the books that really made her want to become a writer were decidedly unpolitical: the travel adventures of the nineteenth-century British explorer Richard Halliburton...
...In her 1988 AIDS and Its Metaphors, she senses conventionality on the rise,as "the new sexual realism goes with the rediscovery of the joys of tonal music, Bouguereau, a career in investment banking, and church weddings?' Even the daredevil Passionara teeters on the verge of a conventional moral response: "AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide...
...Potent as they are in their revulsion from the supreme cruelty of human devising, the canonical works of the antiwar tradition—Sontag especially venerates Goya's etchings of Napoleon's atrocities in Spain, The Disasters of War, Ernst Friedrich's collection of World War I photographs, War Against War...
...Among moral crusaders, it is only the rarest and most saintly who have no taste for worldly glory, even if it is the glory of defying the world...
...She despised both camps for different reasons, but needed the warmth of the herd, and presently reverted to old habits even as she imagined herself a monumental figure of lonesome probity, who alone felt correctly and understood profoundly the horror of totalitarianism...
...Later that year, after Che Guevara met his end, Sontag's scalding tears heated her memorial prose to boiling, as she eulogized the hero of socialist romance who showed American youth that real men still walked the earth...
...The thrill of total immersion in the moment is what Sontag pursues, an effulgent immediacy that baptizes one in the only faith worth having...
...The adolescent Sontag was already as serious as Nietzsche's mustache...
...and Maryna's adulterous intrigue with a young writer, whom she leaves behind for the enforced cultivation of the born artist's vocation...
...Encyclopedic in her ardors, she thought the writer's life promised an unrivaled abundance of experience for the mental traveler as well as the actual globetrotter...
...But the Passionara of the Left would soon rouse the fiercest indignation of the Left, directed at herself...
...Maryna's husband, who discovers his taste for sinewy dark-complected young men...
...Had Bush followed her, and the Ayatollah sneered in response—as he unquestionably would have—America would have had either to swallow the humiliation or act to bring Iran to heel, meaning war...
...She wanted Bush to talk as tough as she did...
...the Paganini of criticism...
...She wanted her life to burn bright as phosphorous so that no one could fail to notice...
...Or murder?' But she backs away from the politically unthinkable conclusion that moral responsibility for the spread of AIDS might now rest with those who have it or who knowingly risk getting it...
...By insisting that the Ayatollah rescind the fatwa, Sontag risked only her own life...
...A writer who wants a serious life needs the most serious companions, and the greatest master might even teach Sontag a thing or two about putting on a show...
...Even among persons of exorbitant mental endowment, Sontag stands out for precocity...
...At its worst it is swill recycled from current agitprop: there is the boor who reduces the superb spiritual promise of boundless American possibility to the freedom to make money...
...An essential part of being a famous New York intellectual is, of course, broadcasting one's political passions to the insensate citizenry who make life west of the Hudson an unrelieved horror...
...Sontag was an honorable exception...
...they are full of portentous jawboning, and their action serves as another form of argument...
...Pinup photographs in obligatory all-black art-girl costume graced thefashion magazines...
...Volcanoes are, of course, given to seething and violent outburst, like the passionate hearts of men...
...the Queen of Camp...
...And thus life is...
...Persons of superior foresight and nerve might have counseled just that, but it is precisely such persons whom Sontag would have reviled as warmongers...
...It was not entirely in self-mockery that Sontag called herself "the Passionara of the Left," after the voluble heroine of the Spanish Republican cause, with whom Hemingway was rumored to have spent a night of love...
...For sheer spectacle her literary career has been surpassed only by Norman Mailer's and Gore Vidal's, and for serious intent, perhaps only by Saul Bellow's and Thomas Pynchon's...
...The alpine purity of a rarefied intellectual and spiritual calling commingled with the flaming desire to amaze the world...
...Susan Sontag—critic, novelist, playwright, director of stage and screen, political gadfly—has provoked raves and ravings and jingling aphorisms from admirers and detractors for the past four decades...
...Her criticism indifferently passed by the classics on which she had been reared and instead assured her readership that they were getting the inside dope on the latest big excitement, preferably from east of Calais, at the very least from south of Houston Street...
...A 1969 article in Ramparts offered instruction in how best to love the Cuban Revolution, which—despite "one bad moment" when the island's population of known homosexuals was consigned to penal reeducation—had freed the Cuban people to be their true joyous selves...
...Suzy Creamcheese...
...the paintings of Gerard Houckgeest and Howard Hodgkin...
...There were dissenters from her triumph...
...Transparence is the highest, most liberating value of art—and in criticism—today...
...As for Diddy, his tumescent new life is in fact a vision occupying the interval between his overdose and his death some hours later, which he never does elude after all...
...Like Sontag herself, the book's principal figure, the British ambassador to Naples, "is interested in everything...
...Fame made up for a lot...
...from Sontag's remarks, one gathered the American Left knew very well how hot fire is, but were certain it would never burn them...
...Philip Rahv acidly observed, "Middle-classism a la Trilling is out, perversion is in...
...Everybody wants to be loved, and there is nothing an audience loves more than a story that confirms their good opinion about themselves...
...Sometimes it seems there is not much that Sontag esteems about Western civilization other than its accommodation to the alien and the extreme, particularly in sexual matters...
...When her father died of tuberculosis, her mother returned to look after Susan and her younger sister.* They lived in Miami, Tucson, and, after Susan's mother married war hero Nathan Sontag in 1945, in suburban Los Angeles...
...The boy frolicked with a machete in the sugarcane fields, while she contemplated Castroism in its then pristine magnificence...
...Osama bin Laden is no more accepting of transgressive sexuality a la Sontag than was Ho Chi Minh or Fidel...
...What attracted her was the demoniacal energy of President Robert Maynard Hutchins, who embodied the life of unremitting intellectual delight with a flamboyance that caught everyone's eye...
...Andy Warhol gave her a screen test...
...Thus she finds genius in the downtown poet-actor Taylor Mead, whose unselfconscious absorption in the roles he inhabits transfigures an evening at a small theater on Fourth Street: "The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy...
...Sontag dutifully got herself arrested, along with the usual gang of right-thinking cognoscenti, at an antiwar rally in 1967, and from there it was off to the races...
...But when death has become an inescapable danger of sexuality without limits, Sontag no longer speaks of it with the same reverent tremolo...
...Sontag finished high school at sixteen, spent a semester at Berkeley, but always had her heart set on the University of Chicago, despite her mother's admonition that the place was overrun with Communists and besieged by Negroes...
...Twenty-some years ago I saw Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour-long Hitler, A Film from Germany and was alternately riveted and bored into stupor...
...Sontag proposes a different way of working...
...In the face of physical danger, Sontag proved herself—pardon the unseemly epithet—manly...
...Indeed, she has succeeded in turning aspiration to the utmost seriousness into a glamorous public spectacle: the high drama of intelligence taking on the world and looking alluringly perfervid doing it...
...there is the maniacal religious zealot who consigns Shakespeare to hellfor gross immorality...
...the autobiographical writings of Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, and Adam Zagajewski...
...No leftist belief was more sacred than the ultimate triumph of Communism, which despite the occasional unavoidable peccadillo would inevitably prove its superiority to foul capitalism and demonstrate at last what genuine democracy means...
...But considered beside a truly intelligent and inventive novel about making an American life triumphant—say, The Adventures of Augie March—Sontag's feeble exercise seems hardly there at all...
...The characters are based on Lord William Hamilton, Lady Hamilton, and Admiral Nelson, who made up the most celebrated threesome in modern history until Moe, Larry, and Curly...
...After a temperate first marriage, he falls in love with a former courtesan, a great beauty past her prime who discovers the passion of her life in a crippled British admiral who is even wilder about her than she is about him...
...Characteristically, she did neither...
...Godard's heroine, Nana, is a failed actress, wife, and mother who takes to a life of prostitution and is gunned down in a shootout between rival pimps...
...In her time left perhaps she will break free of the clutches of Sade, Genet, Barthes, and Bataille, and devote herself entirely to Shakespeare, whom she professes to honor above all others, who holds wisdom found nowhere in our own time, and about whom she has never written...
...to her credit, she did depart from script to mention the miseries of forced collectivization and the persecution of dissidents...
...Diddy, the protagonist of Death Kit, flaccidly attempts suicide, then with a surge of unexampled daring, dives into life-enhancing murderousness and erotic gamble...
...Whipping, branding, genital mutilation: these are but means to win release from one's constricting self, and happily death offers the ultimate release...
...The Bush administration's unwillingness to declare itself on the matter galled her, and torrents of passionate words poured from her outraged lips...
...At a rally in New York's Town Hall to support Poland's outlawed Solidarity Movement in Poland and to denounce Ronald Reagan for firing unionized air traffic controllers and doing wrong in El Salvador, Sontag admitted that she and just about everyone else in the room had been callous about the means and deluded about the ends of Communism...
...Sontag knows that, but when moral clarity conflicts with tribal loyalty, one of them must be sacrificed...
...And having read Sontag's screenplays for her own films Duet for Cannibals (1969) and Brother Carl (1974), I will cross the street while crossing myself to avoid either of them...
...and the pursuit of happiness...
...Brilliant, beautiful, and ablaze with ambition, Sontag by her early thirties had intellectual New York at her feet...
...It is a dilution of the Nietzschean doctrine of amor fati, or love of one's fate, filtered through the gospel of André Gide, whose heroic immoralist discovered the higher morality by following his sexual inclinations wherever they lead...
...We were wrong...
...Just as much to the point, the sort of life Sontag herself has lived and promoted is but one more reason for jihad...
...the company of a genuine autist, like that of a genuine fouryear-old, does get tiresome...
...the novels of Machado de Assis, Danilo Kis, Witold Gombrowicz, Alfred Doblin...
...She judged the suicidal Islamists superior in courage to American pilots who dropped bombs from untouchable heights...
...If the historical record shows anything it is that the militant Islamist enemies of Israel intend the same end for the Jews that Hitler did...
...Conceived in China, where her father, Jack Rosenblatt, ran a fur-trading business, Susan was raised in New York by her grandparents till the age of five...
...Sontag's response is hardly what one commonly thinks of as pacifism...
...To her, tragedy is the failure to realize one's nature, which means principally satisfying one's deepest erotic desires...
...From the beginning, Sontag has urged the recovery of the sensuous life that killjoy Christianity and its legatees have done their best to efface...
...as a resource for ordeal and for breaking through the limits of consciousness" is to discover in oneself the capacity that most people never know they possess...
...B ut if we didn't have to study war anymore, how much of the peace dividend would one wish to devote to the works of Susan Sontag and to the words she adulates...
...Virile heroism does not go unchallenged...
...the ever wholesome Ho Chi Minh would not have been amused...
...Her one really good novel remains the 1992 The Volcano Lover, in which her ruling passion for ruling passions finds its proper objects...
...Life is . life.'" Golly...
...and, with her inimitable coruscating wit, delivering such bons mots as, "The white race is the cancer of human history...
...Thus the speech to [fellow prostitute] Yvette ends with the words: 'A plate is a plate...
...It is the people who live in those [Communist] countries who tell us that...
...When in 1989 the spiritual potentate of Iran pronounced his sentence of death upon Salman Rushdie for his blasphemous novel, The Satanic Verses, Sontag, then president of the international writers' organization PEN, leapt to the defense and issued her own moral condemnation of the intolerant Ayatollah and what she called "an act of terrorism against the life of the mind...
...in "'There' and 'Here," she writes: "The idea that the prosperous, peaceful society of Europe and North America has formed of itself—through the actions and statements of all those who could be called intellectuals—is one of confusion, irresponsibility, selfishness, cowardice...
...The very fact that AIDS exists—that such a disease should appear just when it seemed that boundless freedom was about to grace every last variation of human sexuality—poses a • lethal threat to Sontag's principal undertaking...
...The arrival of AIDS makes her predictably wistful for the days of innocent, or at least untroubled, promiscuity and predictably scornful of those who respond with moral retrenchment...
...avant-garde...
...Presumably she prefers her autism in persons who are not actually autistic...
...the dark lady of American letters...
Vol. 36 • August 2003 • No. 4
