Death as a Middle-Class Hobby

...WRITERS WRITING Death as a Middle-Class Hobby By Raymond Rosenthal Many people will be surprised to learn that Susan Sontag, besides her fame as a critic, can also claim a certain importance as a writer of fiction Her first novel, The Benefactor, was a clever piece of work which elicited high praise from such diverse judges as John Hawkes, Hannah Arendt and R W Flint Flint declared that she had rewritten Pater's Manus the Epicurean for the '60s, and anyone who wants that particular work rewritten (I could barely finish the first version) will find this praise extremely fetching Actually, The Benefactor was a trifle better than its model, the prose was less fruity, the thinking sharper, and although its message of inaction—in Pater a desperate maneuver to avoid the dreadful consequences of his own myticism—was pretty much the same, the novel's polish provided an amusement of a strangely French kind One never laughed outright at Miss Sontag's jokes, they weren't even jokes but rather sly ironies that gave rise to a soundless moue, dry and brittle Indeed she had written a French recit in English, and the neutrality of the language, the absolute absence of any sensuous surface of inner gusto were supposedly compensated for by the elaborate retelling of the protagonist's dreams Do you like to hear other people's dreams, told in minute and nagging detail9 Then Miss Sontag's first novel is for you I don't, so the fact that reading The Benefactor was not an especially painful experience speaks very well for it To tell the truth, it was hardly an experience, in the sense that some lived life in the author managed to communicate itself across the barrier erected by ideas of a special cast—all that noisome bric-a-brac of diabolism and last-century romanticism Miss Son-tag had a personality, but it seemed a bit mummified in the acids of second-hand ideas and third-hand preoccupations I had come across all this before and better imagined, in the works of Wilde, Huysmanns, Lautreamont, and the Surrealists What was new and for the '60s was the author's total inability to make up her mmd about the propositions these progenitors had given her to brood over The novel had a way of concluding on every page yet never arriving at a conclusion, even the end just faded out The preoccupation with dreams was also a bit ambiguous All dreams, as we know, are edited versions of what we have really dreamed, but Miss Sontag's dreams were super-edited to withm an inch of their lives, so that the inhuman and formless, which make dreams both terrible and intriguing, were somehow rigorously excluded from them Of course, she had the excuse that the locale of her novel was an imaginary France, a France where even dreams become reasonable objects, neat and tractable, employed adroitly to support the hero's delicate desire for sensual license and deliberate irresponsibility The France not of Celine or Artaud but of Descartes and Gide Dreams, as Valery has said, owe their reputation to the fact that we wake up But that salutary shock of awakening is never depicted in Miss Sontag's first novel Her hero assumes an immense irresponsibility of which dreams are the mandate He wants to remain in his hypnagogic twilight Perhaps this is what R W Flint meant when he said Miss Sontag had updated Pater for the present uncertain time If you don't know what you feel and what you truly think, dreams are a perfect refuge, for there you are at once author, spectator, auditor and actor, you see and are seen, act and are acted upon, suffer and stand apart from your suffering In The Benefactor, Susan Sontag demonstrated a top-heavy intelligence that, miraculously, made up for the lack of even the slightest trace of sensibility, of those inner choices that cannot be fabricated or synthesized Miracles do not occur on order, however, and Miss Sontag's new novel, Death Kit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 331 pp $5 75), reveals her at the game of trying to outwit her intelligence by immersing it in a turgid tide of sensuously apprehended objects and experiences She apparently knows where she wants to go but, due to a failure of talent abetted by a constricting ideology, never quite gets there This latest novel obviously intends to be admonitory and instructive, to show us Death as a hobby of the inverted, destructive, pampered middle class Diddy is the hero of the book, a well-fed, expensively educated, listless member of the aforementioned group who inhabits his life but does not live it CI am paraphrasing Miss Sontag, who often employs a near-epi-grammatic turn of phrase to keep hei plot and characters moving ) Diddy is 30-odd, works as an advertising man for a microscope company, has recently divorced, lives in a neat apartment with his dog, and is inwardly dying The disease that is killing him, the author implies, has almost universal relevance, bemg bound up with a paialyzmg hfelessness that threatens every aspect of contemporary existence The generator of life runs down, goes amok, "sending forth a torrent of refuse that climbs around Diddy's life, cluttering all his floor space and overwhelming his pleasant furnishings the offensive discharge of the failing or rebellious generator will liquefy But when this fluid evaporates, an uncensored, fetid, appalling under-life is disclosed A landscape of unparalleled savagery " For a while Diddy goes on meeting "the demands of the day," although the surface of life looks "deformed, bloated and laden and crammed with vile juices " Then he tries to hasten the death-process, fails, returns to his job I have reproduced Miss Sontag's imaginative premise because it gives some notion of her style, which is clear and blunt, and some indication of her central theme The esthetic rule in these matters is simple If you intend to make death the primary concern of your novel, you had better be lively about it For about 100 pages Miss Sontag follows this dictum We see Diddy (the name is a pun, of course) kill a trackman in a tunnel, make love to a blind girl, visit the blessedly vulgar home of the trackman's widow, fall in love with the sightless but seemingly clairvoyant girl, offer to marry her All this is told m an ironic, often humorous style Diddy wonders whether he actually did kill, he reads the papers to find out (this is the most amusing point in the novel) The event is buried m bureaucratic intrigue, with the railroad not wanting to admit that its service is inefficient He thirsts for judgment but, in the world he inhabits, there are neither witnesses nor judges Only his own inner forum, his dream life, provides the judges and witnesses he must heed The last, least successful third of the novel is devoted almost entirely to Diddy's dream life, and it is here that Miss Sontag's imagination runs aground Or, more precisely, her logic doubles back on itself and becomes nagging, over-analytical, didactic Diddy thirsts not only for judgment but also for destruction His sexual adventure with the blind girl is intimately connected with a desire for violence, indeed it is his desire for violence in another but equally life-paralyzing form This mechanical man, barely functioning, constantly analyzing, drowning himself in his dream life like rats drown in a sewer, needs the brute impulsion of the train to complete the sexual act Without this external aid his sexual life soon shows itself to be a substitute for the destruction he craves After a brief idyll with Hester, the blind girl, he begins to waste away, not from remorse at his crime but because the crime has been sullied by the outer world's intrusion The true color of the deed must be found, the dreamlike act of murder in the tunnel must be repeated, with the blind girl now as a willing witness and Diddy's own death as its final reward "Crimes call for judgment and punishment, but all he wants is certainty, clanty " Miss Sontag's novel has the value of being exemplary It one wants to know not only what is wrong with our world but also with those who criticize it unthinkingly, one can do no better than read Death Kit To begm with, why should violence and sex, death and sex, always appear in such novels as inevitable pairs, one coming hot-foot at the behest of the other7 This is of course the staple of comic book literature, where the heroine must be terribly mutilated before the hero can enjoy her In serious literature the license for this sadistic orgy comes from Freud and the purpose seems to be hortatory, didactic But Freud didn't give us the license to wallow in the death-feeling, to regard sex as its inevitable accompaniment, to pose as a teacher of life when the lesson one has to teach is so unclear that it can barely be summarized, much less understood The first time Diddy commits his crime he is still a human being, responding blindly to a bizarre sequence of events, but the second time he is lumbering forward to the tune of the Zeitgeist The very deadness of Miss Sontag's prose when describing this ritual second killing gives the show away She is no longer creating out of her own mind and imagination but grinding along, pumping away, like those ugly machines she and her hero both detest The vital world is vulgar, alas, and the listless world is consumed by snobbery Both worlds are eroded by dreams, the savage dreams we fabricate nightly and the prefabricated dreams on our television sets and in our movie houses Not to see, not to hear, to be neutral, humorous—this would seem to be the low-voiced advice that Miss Sontag offers us as the remedy for our pervasive ills I found it appealmgly modest yet ultimately objectionable Good taste may teach one to laugh rather than cry at the world's persistent ugliness, but good taste that is merely a giggle at absurdity hardly measures up to the portentous tasks Miss Sontag assigns it If the line between dream and reality has become blurred, it is the artist's job to redefine it The people in Susan Sontag's world dream but they never manage to wake up The fault lies not in the world—each novel is a world created by its author—but in her own thinking Keats put my essential criticism very well "The poet and the dreamer are distinct,/ Diverse, sheer opposite, antipodes / The one pours out a balm upon the world,/ The other vexes it...