www.slate.com/id/2111506/12/30
The life of the cultivated mind should be private, reticent, discreet: Most of its celebrations will occur with no audienc e, because there can be no applause for that moment when the solitary re ader gets up and paces round the room, having just noticed the hidden im age in the sonnet, or the profane joke in the devotional text, or the se cret message in the prison diaries. Individual pleasure of this kind is only rivaled when the same reader turns into a writer, and after a long wrestle until daybreak hits on his or her own version of the mot juste, or the unmasking of pretension, or the apt, latent literary connection, or the satire upon tyranny. The 20^th century was perhaps unusual in the ways in which it forced such people to quit their desks and their bookshelves and to enter the agora . Looking over our shoulders, we do not find that we have much respect o r admiration for those who simply survived, or who kept the private life alive. We may owe such people more than we know, but it is difficult to view them as exemplary. Our heroes and heroines are those who managed, from Orwell through Camus and Solzhenitsyn, to be both intellectual and engaged. For her, the act of literary consumption was the g enerous parent of the act of literary production. She was so much impres sed by the marvelous people she had readbeginning with Jack London and Thomas Mann in her girlhood, and eventually comprising the almost Borges ian library that was her one prized possessionthat she was almost shy a bout offering her own prose to the reader. Look at her output and you wi ll see that she was not at all prolific.
If it doesn't seem like thatif it seems as if she was always somewhere i n printit is because she timed her interventions very deftly. By the mi ddle 1960s, someone was surely going to say something worth noticing abo ut the energy and vitality of American popular culture. And it probably wasn't going to be any of the graying manes of the old Partisan Review g ang. Sontag's sprightly, sympathetic essays on the diminishing returns o f "high culture" were written by someone who nonetheless had a sense of tradition and who took that high culture seriously (and who was smart en ough to be published in Partisan Review). Her acute appreciation of the importance of photography is something that now seems uncontroversial (t he sure sign of the authentic pioneer), and her "Notes on 'Camp' " were dedicated to the memory of Oscar Wilde, whose fusion of the serious and the subversive was always an inspiration to her, as it is, I can't resis t adding, to too few female writers. In a somewhat parochial time, furthermore, she was an internationalist. I once heard her rather sourly described as American culture's "official greeter," for her role in presenting and introducing the writers of othe r scenes and societies. There was no shame in that charge: Sheand Phili p Rothdid a very great deal to familiarize Americans with the work of C zeslaw Milosz and Danilo Kis, Milan Kundera and Gyrgy Konrd. In Agains t Interpretation, published in 1966, she saw more clearly than most that the future defeat of official Communism was inscribed in its negation o f literature. When Arpad Goncz, the novelist who eventually became a pos t-Communist president of Hungary, was invited to the White House, he req uested that Susan be placed on his guest list. It's hard to think of any other American author or intellectual who would be as sincerely mourned as Susan will be this week, from Berlin to Prague to Sarajevo. Mention of that last place name impels me to say another thing: this time about moral and physical courage. It took a certain amount of nerve for her to stand up on stage, in early 1982 in New York, and to denounce ma rtial law in Poland as "fascism with a human face." Intended as ironic, this remark empurpled the anti-anti-Communists who predominated on the i ntellectual left. But when Slobodan Milosevic adopted full-out national socialism after 1989, it took real guts to go and live under the bombard ment in Sarajevo and to help organize the Bosnian civic resistance. She did not do this as a "tourist," as sneering conservative bystanders like Hilton Kramer claimed. I know, because I saw her in Bosnia and had felt faint-hearted lon g before she did. Her fortitude was demonstrated to all who knew her, and it was often the cause of fortitude in others. She had a long running battle with success ive tumors and sarcomas and was always in the front line for any daring new treatment. Her books on illness and fatalism, and her stout refusal to accept defeat, were an inspiration. So were the many anonymous hours and days she spent in encouraging and advising fellow sufferers. But bes t of all, I felt, was the moment when, as president of American PEN, she had to confront the Rushdie affair in 1989. It's easy enough to see, now, that the offer of murder for cash, made by a depraved theocratic despot and directed at a novelist, was a warning o f the Islamist intoxication that was to come. But at the time, many of t he usual "signers" of petitions were distinctly shaky and nervous, as we re the publishers and booksellers who felt themselves under threat and s ought to back away. Susan Sontag mobilized a tremendous campaign of soli darity that dispelled all this masochism and capitulation. I remember he r saying hotly of our persecuted and hidden friend: "You know, I think a bout Salman every second. I would have done anything for her at that moment, not that she asked or noticed. With that signature black-on-white swoosh in her hair, and her charismati c and hard-traveling style, she achieved something else worthy of notet he status of celebrity without any of the attendant tedium and squalor. She resolutely declined to say anything about her private life or to ind ulge those who wanted to speculate. ") A man is not on his oath, said Samuel Johnson, when he gives a funeral or ation. One ought to try and contest the underlying assumption here, whic h condescendingly excuses those who write nil nisi bonum of the dead. Co uld Susan Sontag be irritating, or hectoring, or righteous? She said and did her own share of foolish things during th e 1960s, later retracting her notorious remark about the white "race" be ing a "cancer" by saying that it slandered cancer patients. In what I th ought was an astonishing lapse, she attempted to diagnose the assault of Sept.
Even the word "ge neral" would have been worse in that sentence, but she had to know bette r She said that she didn't read reviews of her work, when she obviously did. It could sometimes be very difficult to tell her anything or to ha ve her admit that there was something she didn't know or hadn't read. If she was sometimes a little permissive, launching a trial balloon only to deflate it later ( as with her change of heart on the filmic aesthetic of Leni Riefenstahl) this promiscuity was founded in curiosity and liveliness. About 20 year s ago, I watched her having an on-stage discussion with Umberto Eco in d owntown New York. Eco was a bit galumphinghe declared that his favorite novel was Lolita because he could picture himself in the part of Umbert o Umberto. Susan, pressed to define the word "polymath," was both sweet and solemn. "To be a polymath," she declared, "is to be interested in ev erythingand in nothing else." She was always trying to do too much and square the circle: to stay up late debating and discussing and have the last word, then get a really early night, then stay up reading, and then make an early start. She couldn't stand affectless or bored or cynical people, of any age. Sh e only ventured into full-length fiction when she was almost 60, and the n discovered that she had a whole new life. And she resisted the last ma lady with terrific force and resource, so that to describe her as life-a ffirming now seems to me suddenly weak. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contrib utor to Slate.
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