Susan Sontag
Berman, Paul
SUSAN SONTAG, who died in December at age seventy-one, was a brave intellectual; but her bravery was not just intellectual. In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and...
...Rushdie, who was still in hiding, sent a statement in support, and my own role was to go onstage and read aloud his statement (which, laughable though it may seem, is how I know that, in those days, to stand up in public on Rushdie's behalf did require a few gulps and a private rumination on the meaning of bravery...
...Wasn't American intervention an atrocity by definition, something to avoid at all cost...
...And if she got off a wild and overblown remark now and then, well, these remarks expressed her high spirits, the aphoristic élan of being sure in her own mind about some issue of genuine importance and complexity—perhaps even at moments when a little self-doubt might have done her good...
...Her acts of bravery were not acts of vanity...
...The best literature has always struggled to be two things at once—to be local and to be cosmopolitan, and each of those ambitions is genuinely difficult to achieve...
...her thoughts, much too personal to make up a scientific system...
...and the people who harp on her foolish or hyperbolic remarks have missed the point...
...The literature of France has always obsessed over the business of recording the rational or irrational thought processes of writers themselves—an obsession for the subjective...
...And this was a magnificent thing to do...
...And yet her greatest physical courage of all was to go on writing and thinking in spite of the dreadful fact that many of her adult years were devoted to battling cancer, over and over again...
...It is hard to remember today how much bravery was required in the Rushdie affair, and it is equally hard to remember how controversial was this call for intervention in the Balkans...
...This was the style that has descended from Montaigne—the style not of the American essay in its several versions, but of the French essay...
...But these complaints, too, miss the point...
...Senate...
...She merely put on a play...
...She merely trained everyone's eyes on the Sarajevo scene—on people who loved theater and literature, and were not haters, and were nonetheless going to be killed or driven from their homes, unless powerful countries from abroad rose to their defense...
...This time she and I were not in total agreement...
...but her key achievement was to demonstrate that it was possible to think in a Barthes-like fashion, and to do so in English...
...And yet, on other occasions she achieved exactly what she wanted to achieve...
...Her essay "Notes on Camp" reflected an influence from the French...
...Perhaps she owed something to Barthes's master, Gide, in these regards—which might be another reason why she had so much difficulty writing about Gide...
...and these critics have found her wanting...
...I could only roll my eyes in response...
...A few years later Susan went to Sarajevo, in Bosnia...
...We persuaded a magnificent list of people to come and speak—Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, David Rieff (Susan's son, who was already reporting from Bosnia), Stanley Crouch, Leon Wieseltier (one of the organizers), Simon Schama, and quite a few others, not to mention Wynton Marsalis, who played the trumpet...
...I think that, in the United States, Susan's achievement in doing this has never been fully appreciated...
...But there is another, more philosophical explanation for the French penchant for intellectual engagement...
...But Susan did stand up, and gave the impression that doing so was merely, for her, a matter of instinct, requiring no courage at all...
...The élan was her greatest charm, in my eyes...
...In 1989, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced Salman Rushdie and his publishers to death, a great many people all over the world, on the left and on the right, fell over themselves trying to explain that Rushdie must have done something truly unforgivable in his Satanic Verses, and that perhaps he was merely an opportunist, a man trying to sell books in the most sensationalist of ways—as Jimmy Carter managed to suggest...
...And it fell to Susan, not to any of the political leaders, to explain that Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie had already threatened an American publisher with death, and that freedom of literature might well be a national interest of the United States...
...There was no ordinary or safe way to do such a thing...
...A number of us who felt the same way organized an event DISSENT / Spring 2005 109 CHRONICLES called "An Evening for Sarajevo" at a West Side theater, for the ostensible purpose of raising money for the members of the PEN Club in Sarajevo...
...They were displays of self-consistency...
...In New York in those days, I was one of the people who were stirred to action by Susan's gesture in Sarajevo...
...she remained in character as an intellectual and artist...
...Since I am going down the list of Susan's flaws, I ought to mention that sometimes she made foolish statements, too—and her foolish statements are destined to be engraved in her biography, if only because some people will always take pleasure in hanging outlandish remarks from the neck of any vulnerable intellectual...
...This was a theme of gigantic importance, full of a thousand implications...
...That is why she has always been recognized as a world writer, and not just an American one...
...There is a pleasure in the hard work of thinking, and she was bursting with pleasure...
...But Susan wrote in a style that was serious, learned, literary, philosophical, moral, and deeply personal at the same time—though not necessarily confessional...
...They have wanted to rely on their own eyes, and not just on reports from the experts and journalists—have wanted to learn what they themselves, as individuals, may discover— to feel things with their own skin, and not just comment from afar...
...More than fifty people were killed around the world as a result of the ayatollah's fatwa and anti-Rushdie rioting...
...In modern times, engagement has been a particularly marked custom of the French intellectuals—much more so than of their counterparts in the United States...
...Yet, she wrote in good, straightforward American prose, and this was an unusual combination...
...The intellectuals, ho, ho...
...Those were the arguments...
...During the time I worked with her on our little campaign for Sarajevo, she struck me as nearly insufferable—virtually sneering at some of us who were fully in agreement with her and who, out of enthusiasm, were faithfully toiling in her service...
...She was determined to be forceful and lucid, and she insisted on being so, and I believe that, in order to achieve her forcefulness and lucidity, she worked extremely hard...
...Susan's achievement was a step toward the cosmopolitan...
...She was trying to write an essay on André Gide and his attitudes toward the Soviet Union—which I took to mean, she was trying to work out her retrospective view on the old-fashioned pro-Soviet attitudes of the left...
...She helped introduce Roland Barthes to American readers...
...Susan directed a production of Waiting for Godot there...
...But, in doing this, she demonstrated vividly to cosmopolitan and liberal-minded people all over the world what was at stake in Sarajevo—namely, the survival of the kind of urbane civilization that might put on a production of Waiting for Godot...
...This is partly a result of French history in the twenDISSENT / Spring 2005 111 CHRONICLES tieth century, and especially the experience of the war against fascism...
...A suicide bomber attacked a British hotel, and Rushdie's Italian translator was stabbed...
...Susan took a different view, and when she saw me at the meeting, she could barely bring herself to nod hello...
...Either way, her confession about struggling with this topic suggested to me how much work went into her clarity and forcefulness...
...the Marxist presentation of theses...
...was duly published, and I missed it, and I should look it up today...
...and her own mentality was that of a French essayist...
...She introduced a number of European and Latin American writers to the American public...
...Perhaps she did, and her essay on Gide and the U.S.S.R...
...And she was trying to do this by thinking about Gide and his own struggles with these questions, long ago, when these particular ambitions were even harder to achieve than in her own time...
...Susan went to Sarajevo— and her loyal readers have intuitively understood that, in taking these risks, she was remaining within the spirit of her own writings...
...I have looked on the war in Iraq as roughly similar to the war against Slobodan Milosevic—a war to overthrow a tyrant and to help his oppressed victims establish a free society, for their own benefit, and for the world's...
...thoughts did not descend on her like rain...
...She was enjoying herself...
...The city was under violent siege by crazed Serbian nationalists...
...She was especially influential in bringing attention to the French writers of the postwar period...
...112 DISSENT / Spring 2005...
...Not long ago, I ran into her at the Council on Foreign Relations, where I presented my view of the Iraq War...
...It took courage to stand up for Rushdie...
...Our real purpose in staging this event was somewhat bigger, of course—to push Bill Clinton and the Congress to do something useful or, at least, to give the Bosnians the means to defend themselves...
...HER SINGULAR contribution to the literature and thought of the United States was to break out of the parochial habits that have always constricted so much of American writing, and to reach outward to the world...
...I can imagine that Susan's physical courage likewise owed something to her French inspiration...
...It was a lasting achievement—a new kind of essay for the literature of the United States...
...And, in this indirect fashion, she appealed for help from her own country, as well— the faraway and largely indifferent United States, which was in a position to rescue the besieged Sarajevans, if only the American leaders would rise to the occasion...
...But, as she told me, she had gotten stuck— a frustrating moment, for her...
...Wasn't a new Vietnam-style disaster in the making...
...Wasn't an American intervention likely to enrage and embitter the Russians, who were bound to react with violence and resentment...
...the academic essay...
...Some of the American critics have wanted to find in her work the shimmery prose of conventional American essays or the system-building manias of the academic writers...
...So we gave the money to Susan, in cash, and off she went, into the war zone...
...A version of this article has appeared in Spanish translation in Letras Libres...
...And this was precisely the right impression to give...
...The analytic essay in America, considered as a genre of literature, has traditionally tended to follow one of several models—the gentleman's amateur rumination in the English style (this is the great model for the New Yorker, where Susan published some of her writing...
...Sometimes she was humorous...
...And this obsession has made it natural for French writers to want to go out into the world and see for themselves...
...Her prose tends to be unadorned...
...Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, and two Norwegian bookstores were bombed...
...She wanted to condemn the Soviet Union and communism, and yet not fall into a series of political clichés that she abhorred—to arrive at her own thoughts, and not simply at a set of already existing formulas...
...the hortatory and aphoristic sermon, in the style of Emerson...
...SUSAN COULD be hard to take...
...In that year, Susan happened to be the president of the American branch of PEN and, in that capacity, testified to the U.S...
...Sometimes the harvest failed to appear...
...But these flaws of hers—her haughtiness, her insouciant outlandishness (when it pleased her to be outlandish)—have always seemed to me inseparable from her great virtues...
...PAUL BERMAN'S most recent book is Terror and Liberalism...
...They were daunting...
...By directing a play (and what a play, for a city under siege...
...One day she invited me to come chat with her at home, during the time when she was living in one of the old nineteenthcentury townhouses on King Street, in Greenwich Village...
...and the impersonal book review...
...She didn't present herself as a warrior, or a geopolitical strategist, or an armchair general...
...She lived under a shadow...
...She sat back on a sofa, her feet propped on a coffee table, and somehow she fell into a rueful confession of the difficulties that were weighing upon her at that particular moment...
...And she may well have felt, after having done so much work, that she was entitled to hold herself like a queen, and be as haughty as she liked...
...In directing the play, Susan addressed none of those questions, and this was her brilliance...
...and radiated life, all the while...
...I never learned whether she finally completed this essay...
...For if the United States intervened militarily, wouldn't this amount to an act of imperialism, akin to American interventions in Latin America a century ago...
...But I think her biggest achievement was something larger than merely introducing these writers and their ideas to the United States, and larger than incorporating a few ideas from abroad into her own thinking...
...And we had to figure out how to get this very nice sum to the PEN Club of Sarajevo— to the people under Serbian siege...
...We did raise some money, though, amounting to $40,000, a nice sum...
...Susan was concerned with mentalities more than with surfaces, even if she wrote about surfaces...
...Or maybe she gave up on the essay, and turned to something 110 DISSENT / Spring 2005 CHRONICLES else...
...She could not move her essay forward...
...She labored, as any thinker must labor...
...And so, Gide went to the U.S.S.R., and Malraux fought in Spain, and Regis Debray joined Che, and Andre Glucksmann went to Chechnya...
...People who do not appreciate the vast difference between one languageculture and another—which is to say, most of Susan's readers in the United States— will never understand how great was her achievement in doing this...
Vol. 52 • April 2005 • No. 2
