Susan Sontag

IT IS hard to be an intellectual in the United States. In France, a wizened man or woman in a black beret, smoking unfiltered Gitanes and with a copy of Sartre's “La nausée” in his pocket, is considered a national treasure. Reverent circles form around him in cafés. When he wishes to muse about the existentialist paradigm, he is given a double-page spread in Le Monde. His brief but seminal work, “Fifi et le nouvel hermeneutique”, wins the Prix Goncourt and is seen being read on the Métro.

In America, by contrast, intellectuals are mocked as “pointy-heads” and “nattering nabobs”. They are a tiny, struggling species, whose habitat is confined to a few uptown apartments in New York and the faculties of certain universities. There they swap thin, sad monographs on self-image and the role of gender in criticism, or vice versa, while Oprah Winfrey is hailed on national TV as the arbiter of literary taste.

Susan Sontag therefore achieved the near-impossible: she was a European-style intellectual in America, and many Americans had both heard of her, and read her books. Moreover, she wrote clearly and well, in short words and short sentences that were blessedly free of the tech-tosh that passes for English in most haunts of intellectualism. Educated Americans were delighted to find someone who had not only read Roland Barthes and Elias Canetti, as somehow they felt they ought to every time they opened the New York Review of Books, but who could tell them what those guys were talking about, and whether they were any good.

Whether what Miss Sontag said itself made sense was another question. She was very good at epigrams; but epigrams, after that nip of pleasure, can turn out empty. “Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance”, she wrote in “Notes on Camp” in 1964. “Thinking is a form of feeling; feeling is a form of thinking,” she opined in “Against Interpretation” in 1966. In 1982, at a rally in New York, she famously described communism as “fascism with a human face”. All these were pretty much pure rubbish, though stated with style.

Yet Miss Sontag also managed to engage Americans with deep and relevant inquiries into modern life. In “On Photography” (1977), she subtly anatomised the social and moral impact of the ubiquitous camera lens. In “Illness as Metaphor” (1978), she described and condemned the casual use of “cancer” as a metaphor for any evil, invincible thing. In her last years, herself facing cancer with dauntless ferocity, she wrote as strongly as ever against the internments at Guantánamo Bay and the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

For much of her life, her politics was unfortunate. She was an ardent campaigner for human rights, especially for free speech for writers; but as an intellectual, especially of a European sort, she was more or less obliged to be on the hard left. A trip to Hanoi in 1968 convinced her that America was “a doomed country...founded on a genocide”. Anyone who thought the years had mellowed her received a rude shock when, after the September 11th attacks, she wrote in the New Yorker that America had deserved it.

Camp and romance

She was bookish almost from birth. At three, she was reading; at nine, living in Los Angeles, she was browsing Poe, Hugo and “Hamlet” in the Pickwick bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard; at 14, she discovered Thomas Mann. Each book was “a door to a whole kingdom”. In later life, when she had acquired 25,000 of them, ranged along every wall and corridor of her spartan apartment in New York, she would spend time simply pacing in front of them, thinking of all they contained.

Her writing life was not without struggle. In New York in the early 1960s, fresh-divorced and with a small son, she lived in poverty for a time, earning what she could by writing articles for the Partisan Review. Her first book, an experimental novel, caused bafflement. Oddly, it was the “Notes on Camp”, a series of humorous jottings, that launched her. After that, she was a fixture in all public moral debate.

She cut a solitary and intriguing figure, a sort of prowling lioness with a shock of black hair streaked with bright white, aggressively bitten fingernails, and the penetrating gaze of a woman who did not suffer fools gladly, or even people of average intelligence. Yet she was, at heart, a populist. She believed that books should be accessible. She argued, in “Against Interpretation”, that art needed to be freed from the deadening layers of criticism and analysis and allowed to speak, sensuously, for itself. (Her own medicine proved hard for her to swallow, but she tried.) She wrote as happily about the Supremes or Harpo Marx as about Camus. Her fondness for camp sprang not only from her homosexual sympathies (she lived for years with Annie Liebovitz, whose unsparing photography fitted well with her own prose), but from the fact that camp could be found in feather boas and the National Enquirer.

In 1992 she wrote “The Volcano Lover”, a romantic novel about Nelson and Lady Hamilton. She produced it, she said, in a delirium of pleasure. Her fans had doubtless been expecting something like “The Plague”. They forgot, perhaps—it was easy to forget—that her childhood had been spent not in Paris, but in Tinseltown.