brdgt | New York Times Piece on Sontag

AN APPRECIATION | SUSAN SONTAG
A Rigorous Intellectual Dressed in Glamour
By CHARLES McGRATH, The New York Times, December 29, 2004

Susan Sontag, who died yesterday at 71, was one of the few intellectuals with whom Americans have ever been on a first-name basis. It wasn't intimacy that gave her this status; it was that like Marilyn and like Judy, she was so much a star that she didn't need a surname. In certain circles, at least, she was just Susan, even to people who had never met her but who would nevertheless talk knowledgeably and intimately about her latest piece in The New York Review of Books, her position on Sarajevo, her verdict on the new W. G. Sebald book. She brought to the world of ideas not just an Olympian rigor but a glamour and sexiness it had seldom seen before.

Part of the appeal was her own glamour - the black outfits, the sultry voice, the trademark white stripe parting her long dark hair. The other part was the dazzle of her intelligence and the range of her knowledge; she had read everyone, especially all those forbidding Europeans - Artaud, Benjamin, Canetti, Barthes, Baudrillard, Gombrowicz, Walser and the rest - who loomed off on what was for many of us the far and unapproachable horizon.

Nor was she shy about letting you know how much she had read (and, by implication, how much you hadn't), or about decreeing the correct opinion to be held on each of the many subjects she turned her mind to. That was part of the appeal, too: her seriousness and her conviction, even if it was sometimes a little crazy-making. Consistency was not something Ms. Sontag worried about overly much because she believed that the proper life of the mind was one of re-examination and re-invention.

Ms. Sontag could be a divisive figure, and she was far from infallible, as when she embraced revolutionary communism after traveling to Hanoi in 1968 and later declared the United States to be a "doomed country ... founded on a genocide." But what her opponents sometimes failed to credit was her willingness to change her mind; by the 80's she was denouncing communism for its human-rights abuses, and by the 90's she had extended her critique to include the left in general, for its failure to encourage intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda. She had found herself "moved to support things which I did not think would be necessary to support at all in the past," she said in a rueful interview, adding, "Like seriousness, for instance."

Not that she was ever unserious for very long. There was about most of her work a European sobriety and high-mindedness and an emphasis on the moral, rather than sensual, pleasures of art and the imagination. Her reputation rests on her nonfiction - especially the essays in "Against Interpretation" and "Styles of Radical Will" and the critical studies "On Photography" and "Illness as Metaphor" - while the 1967 novel "Death Kit," written to a highbrow formula of dissociation, now seems all but unreadable.

For a while Ms. Sontag took the French position that in the right hands criticism was an even higher art form than imaginative literature, but in the 80's she announced that she was devoting herself to fiction. She wrote the indelible short story "The Way We Live Now," one of the most affecting fictional evocations of the AIDS era, and in 1992 she published a novel, "The Volcano Lover," that had all the earmarks of the kind of novel she had once made fun of. It was historical and it was a romance, about the love affair of Lord Nelson and Emma Hamilton. Being a Sontag production, it was of course brainy and stuffed with fact-laden research, but as many critics pointed out, there was also a lightness and even - who would have guessed? - an old-fashioned wish to entertain. Much the same was true of her last novel, "In America," which came out in 2000, about a Polish actress who comes to the United States at the end of the 19th century.

Ms. Sontag was too much a critic and essayist to stick to her resolve; her last book, "Regarding the Pain of Others" (2003), was nonfiction, an outspoken tract on how we picture suffering. Last May she expanded on those ideas for an article in The New York Times Magazine about the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. This piece was classic, provocative Sontag. But those late novels, playful and theatrical, are a reminder that behind that formidable, opinionated and immensely learned persona there was another Sontag, warmer and more vulnerable, whom we got to see only in glimpses.