Fire and ice

Susan Sontag wrote out of glorious, coldblooded anger. It's painful that today, when clarifying rage is about all we have left, her powerful voice is silent.

By Craig Seligman

Jan 4, 2005 | Mutual friends told me about an evening they spent with Susan Sontag a few months before she entered her final illness. They were talking about George Plimpton's peaceful death, in his sleep, and my friends agreed that they would want to go that way. Sontag replied that she wouldn't. She wanted to die of cancer -- "I want to experience my death." How resplendently Sontag. The contrarianism, the fearlessness, the romantic infatuation with experience, the almost Faustian hunger for knowledge, the absolute and unfaltering commitment to consciousness and, of course, the sensuality of the intellect: Always, always she wanted to feel -- and to think about what she felt.

The recent photographs that accompanied Sontag's obituaries in the world press may have given her the last opportunity to shock her audience. In 1992, when, a few months before her 60th birthday, she posed for a portrait on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, she was still beautiful. By the time she died, the beauty had gone. But you can't say she lost her looks. She looked great. She'd always been exasperated with the level of scrutiny devoted to her appearance, and it was gratifying to watch the way she carried herself after her gorgeousness deserted her. She seemed pleased. Accepting phone-in questions on a long, incisive "Bookspan: In Depth" interview ("Sometimes I think we only have one party, the Republican Party, and it has a branch called the Democratic Party") in March 2003, she projected something very different from the old hauteur. Her strong jaw had taken over her face, and the icy fineness had given way to power and warmth. Sontag was never lacking in self-regard; she was hardly unaware of the figure she cut; but her lack of personal vanity was startling -- as startling as her beauty.

At least, that's how it looked from a distance, to me. I never met Sontag. My relation to her was entirely one of reader to writer, and in "Sontag & Kael" I proffered some judgments I know she could never have forgiven me for. No writer is that lacking in vanity -- and when it came to her writing, Sontag was as preening as any other master. Above all she would have been angry at me for preferring, as almost everybody does, her criticism to her fiction. But then Sontag was no stranger to quixotry. Her impossibly high standards were a golden form of quixotry, and in her lexicon "quixotry" was an accolade. Moralism wouldn't amount to much without determination against terrible odds; not that long ago, Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela, to cite the most obvious examples, would have been called quixotic.

But if I wrote things she would have disliked (I tell myself), nobody would have been more disgusted by hollow praise. Not only wasn't praise something she sought, but she seemed to go out of her way to attract its opposite. Much about Sontag -- as her many obituaries have pointed out -- was maddening. There was a lot of belligerence you had to cut through and shooting-from-the-hip you had to clear away in order to get to the greatness. One of her acolytes spent a good hour on the phone insisting to me that the only valuable form of criticism is the form Sontag practiced: praise. Her portrait essays are small festivals of praise. Though I love those essays, I don't agree. The only valuable form of criticism is the truth. Between truth and justice "one hopes not to have to choose," Sontag wrote. "But when a choice is necessary -- as, alas, it sometimes is -- it seems to me that an intellectual ought to decide for the truth." That's why taking her to task was, if this doesn't sound too self-serving, a necessary component of honoring her. She never claimed she never erred; in fact, she took pride in correcting her errors. But she was always an angry writer, and her anger angered her readers, roiling around in the mind until -- magically -- it settled into thought.

Next Page: Despairing words. But the very act of writing implies the opposite of despair

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