Susan
Sontag, Interviewed by Edward Hirsch
The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 143
Susan Sontag lives in a sparsely furnished five-room
apartment on the top floor of a building in Chelsea on the west side of
Manhattan. Books—as many as fifteen thousand—and papers are everywhere. A
lifetime could be spent browsing through the books on art and architecture,
theater and dance, philosophy and psychiatry, the history of medicine, and the
history of religion, photography, and opera—and so on. The various European
literatures—French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, etcetera, as well as
hundreds of books of Japanese literature and books on Japan—are arranged by
language in a loosely chronological way. So is American literature as well as
English literature, which runs fromBeowulf to, say, James Fenton. Sontag is an
inveterate clipper, and the books are filled with scraps of paper (“Each book
is marked and filleted,” she says), the bookcases festooned with notes scrawled
with the names of additional things to read.
Sontag usually writes by hand
on a low marble table in the living room. Small theme notebooks are filled with
notes for her novel in progress, “In America.” An old book on Chopin sits atop
a history of table manners. The room is lit by a lovely Fortuny lamp, or a
replica of one. Piranesi prints decorate the wall (architectural prints are one
of her passions).
Everything in Sontag’s
apartment testifies to the range of her interests, but it is the work itself,
like her conversation, that demonstrates the passionate nature of her
commitments. She is eager to follow a subject wherever it leads, as far as it
will go—and beyond. What she has said about Roland Barthes is true about her as
well: “It was not a question of knowledge . . . but of alertness, a fastidious
transcription of what could be thought about something, once it
swam into the stream of attention.”
Sontag was interviewed in her
Manhattan apartment on three blisteringly hot days in July of 1994. She had
been traveling back and forth to Sarajevo, and it was gracious of her to set
aside time for the interview. Sontag is a prodigious talker—candid, informal,
learned, ardent—and each day at a wooden kitchen table held forth for seven-
and eight-hour stretches. The kitchen is a mixed-use room, but the fax machine
and the photocopier were silent; the telephone seldom rang. The conversation
ranged over a vast array of subjects—later the texts would be scoured and
revised—but always returned to the pleasures and distinctions of literature.
Sontag is interested in all things concerning writing—from the mechanism of the
process to the high nature of the calling. She has many missions, but foremost
among them is the vocation of the writer.
Susan Sontag in 1962
INTERVIEWER
When did you begin writing?
SUSAN SONTAG
I’m not sure. But I know I was
self-publishing when I was about nine; I started a four-page monthly newspaper,
which I hectographed (a very primitive method of duplication) in about twenty
copies and sold for five cents to the neighbors. The paper, which I kept going
for several years, was filled with imitations of things I was reading. There
were stories, poems and two plays that I remember, one inspired by Čapek’s R.U.R., the other
by Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria de Capo. And
accounts of battles—Midway, Stalingrad, and so on; remember, this was 1942,
1943, 1944—dutifully condensed from articles in real newspapers.
INTERVIEWER
We’ve had to postpone this interview
several times because of your frequent trips to Sarajevo that, you’ve told me,
have been one of the most compelling experiences of your life. I was thinking
how war recurs in your work and life.
SONTAG
It does. I made two trips to North Vietnam
under American bombardment, the first of which I recounted in “Trip to Hanoi,”
and when the Yom Kippur War started in 1973 I went to Israel to shoot a film, Promised
Lands, on the front lines. Bosnia is actually my third war.
INTERVIEWER
There’s the denunciation of military
metaphors in Illness as Metaphor.
And the narrative climax of The Volcano Lover,
a horrifying evocation of the viciousness of war. And when I asked you to
contribute to a book I was editing, Transforming Vision: Writers
on Art, the work you chose to write about was Goya’s The
Disasters of War.
SONTAG
I suppose it could seem odd to travel to a
war, and not just in one’s imagination—even if I do come from a family of
travelers. My father, who was a fur trader in northern China, died there during
the Japanese invasion—I was five. I remember hearing about “world war” in
September 1939, entering elementary school, where my best friend in the class
was a Spanish Civil War refugee. I remember panicking on December 7, 1941. And
one of the first pieces of language I ever pondered over was “for the
duration”—as in “there’s no butter for the duration.” I recall savoring the
oddity, and the optimism, of that phrase.
INTERVIEWER
In “Writing Itself,” on Roland Barthes,
you express surprise that Barthes, whose father was killed in one of the
battles of the First World War (Barthes was an infant) and who, as a young man
himself, lived through the Second World War—the Occupation—never once mentions
the word war in any of his writings. But your work
seems haunted by war.
SONTAG
I could answer that a writer is someone
who pays attention to the world.
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote of Promised
Lands: “My subject is war, and anything about any war that does not
show the appalling concreteness of destruction and death is a dangerous lie.”
SONTAG
That prescriptive voice rather makes me
cringe. But . . . yes.
INTERVIEWER
Are you writing about the siege of
Sarajevo?
SONTAG
No. I mean, not yet, and probably not for
a long time. And almost certainly not in the form of an essay or report. David
Rieff, who is my son, and who started going to Sarajevo before I did, has published
such an essay-report, a book called Slaughterhouse—and
one book in the family on the Bosnian genocide is enough. So I’m not spending
time in Sarajevo to write about it. For the moment it’s enough for me just to
be there as much as I can—to witness, to lament, to offer a model of
noncomplicity, to pitch in. The duties of a human being, one who believes in
right action, not of a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Did you always want to be a writer?
SONTAG
I read the biography of Madame Curie by
her daughter, Eve Curie, when I was about six, so at first I thought I was
going to be a chemist. Then for a long time, most of my childhood, I wanted to
be a physician. But literature swamped me. What I really wanted was every kind
of life, and the writer’s life seemed the most inclusive.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have any role models as a writer?
SONTAG
Of course I thought I was Jo in Little
Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin
Eden I found a
writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be
Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw
myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle
of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation.
INTERVIEWER
Any other models?
SONTAG
Later, when I was thirteen, I read the
journals of André Gide, which described a life of great privilege and
relentless avidity.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember when you started reading?
SONTAG
When I was three, I’m told. Anyway, I
remember reading real books—biographies, travel books—when I was about six. And
then free fall into Poe and Shakespeare and Dickens and the Brontës and Victor
Hugo and Schopenhauer and Pater, and so on. I got through my childhood in a
delirium of literary exaltations.
INTERVIEWER
You must have been very different from
other children.
SONTAG
Was I? I was good at dissembling too. I
didn’t think that much about myself, I was so glad to be on to something
better. But I so wanted to be elsewhere. And reading produced its blissful,
confirming alienations. Because of reading—and music—my daily experience was of
living in a world of people who didn’t give a hoot about the intensities to
which I had pledged myself. I felt as if I were from another planet— a fantasy
borrowed from the innocent comic books of that era, to which I was also
addicted. And of course I didn’t really have much sense of how I was seen by
others. Actually, I never thought people were thinking of me at all. I do
remember—I was about four—a scene in a park, hearing my Irish nanny saying to
another giant in a starched white uniform, Susan is very high-strung, and
thinking, That’s an interesting word. Is it true?
INTERVIEWER
Tell me something about your education.
SONTAG
All in public schools, quite a number of
them, each one more lowering than the one before. But I was lucky to have
started school before the era of the child psychologists. Since I could read
and write, I was immediately put into the third grade, and later I was skipped
another semester, so I was graduated from high school—North Hollywood High
School—when I was still fifteen. After that, I had a splendid education at
Berkeley, then at the so-called Hutchins College of the University of Chicago,
and then as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard and Oxford. I was a
student for most of the 1950s and I never had a teacher from whom I didn’t
learn. But at Chicago, the most important of my universities, there were not
just teachers I admired but three to whose influence I gratefully submitted:
Kenneth Burke, Richard McKeon, and Leo Strauss.
INTERVIEWER
What was Burke like as a teacher?
SONTAG
Completely inside his own enthralling way
of unpacking a text. He spent almost a year with the class reading Conrad’s Victory word by word, image by image. It was
from Burke that I learned how to read. I still read the way he taught me. He
took some interest in me. I had already read some of his books before he was my
teacher in Humanities III; remember, he wasn’t well known then and he’d never
met an undergraduate who had read him while still in high school. He gave me a
copy of his novel, Towards a Better Life,
and told me stories about sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village in the
1920s with Hart Crane and Djuna Barnes—you can imagine what that did to me. He
was the first person I met who had written books that I owned. (I except an
audience I was roped into with Thomas Mann when I was fourteen years old, which
I recounted in a story called “Pilgrimage.”) Writers were as remote to me as
movie stars.
INTERVIEWER
You had your B.A. from the University of
Chicago at eighteen. Did you know by then you would become a writer?
SONTAG
Yes, but I still went to graduate school.
It never occurred to me that I could support myself as a writer. I was a
grateful, militant student. I thought I would be happy teaching, and I was. Of
course, I had been careful to prepare myself to teach not literature but
philosophy and the history of religion.
INTERVIEWER
But you taught only through your twenties,
and have refused countless invitations to return to university teaching. Is
this because you came to feel that being an academic and being a creative
writer are incompatible?
SONTAG
Yes. Worse than incompatible. I’ve seen
academic life destroy the best writers of my generation.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mind being called an intellectual?
SONTAG
Well, one never likes to be called
anything. And the word makes more sense to me as an adjective than as a noun,
though, even so, I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless
oddity—especially if one is a woman. Which makes me even more committed to my
polemics against the ruling anti-intellectual clichés—heart versus head,
feeling versus intellect, and so forth.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself as a feminist?
SONTAG
That’s one of the few labels I’m content
with. But even so . . . is it a noun? I doubt it.
INTERVIEWER
What women writers have been important to
you?
SONTAG
Many. Sei Shonagon, Austen, George Eliot,
Dickinson, Woolf, Tsvetayeva, Akhmatova, Elizabeth Bishop, Elizabeth Hardwick .
. . the list is much longer than that. Because women are, culturally speaking,
a minority, with my minority consciousness I always rejoice in the achievement
of women. With my writer’s consciousness, I rejoice in any writer I can admire,
women writers no more or less than men.
INTERVIEWER
Whatever the models of a literary vocation
that inspired you as a child, I have the impression that your adult idea of a
literary vocation is more European than American.
SONTAG
I’m not so sure. I think it’s my own
private brand. But what is true is that living in the second half of the
twentieth century, I could indulge my Europhile tastes without actually
expatriating myself, while still spending a lot of my adult life in Europe.
That’s been my way of being an American. As Gertrude Stein remarked, “What good
are roots if you can’t take them with you?” One might say that’s very Jewish,
but it’s also very American.
INTERVIEWER
Your third novel, The
Volcano Lover, seems to me a very American book, even though the story
it tells takes place in eighteenth-century Europe.
SONTAG
It is. Nobody but an American would have
written The Volcano Lover.
INTERVIEWER
And The Volcano Lover’s
subtitle: “A Romance.” That’s a reference to Hawthorne, right?
SONTAG
Exactly. I was thinking of what Hawthorne
says in the preface to The House of Seven Gables:
“When a writer calls his work a romance, it need hardly be observed that he
wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which
he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he been writing a novel.”
My imagination is very marked by nineteenth-century American literature—first
by Poe, whom I read at a precocious age and whose mixture of speculativeness,
fantasy, and gloominess enthralled me. Poe’s stories still inhabit my head.
Then by Hawthorne and Melville. I love Melville’s obsessiveness. Clarel,Moby-Dick. And Pierre—another
novel about the terrible thwarting of a heroic solitary writer.
INTERVIEWER
Your first book was a novel, The
Benefactor. Since then you’ve written essays, travel narratives,
stories, plays, as well as two more novels. Have you ever started something in
one form and then changed it to another?
SONTAG
No. From the beginning I always know what
something is going to be; every impulse to write is born of an idea of form,
for me. To begin I have to have the shape, the architecture. I can’t say it
better than Nabokov did: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing.”
INTERVIEWER
How fluent are you as a writer?
SONTAG
I wrote The Benefactor quickly, almost effortlessly, on
weekends and during two summers (I was teaching in the department of religion
at Columbia College); I thought I was telling a pleasurably sinister story that
illustrated the fortune of certain heretical religious ideas that go by the
name of Gnosticism. The early essays came easily too. But writing is an
activity that in my experience doesn’t get easier with practice. On the
contrary.
INTERVIEWER
How does something get started for you?
SONTAG
It starts with sentences, with phrases,
and then I know something is being transmitted. Often it’s an opening line. But
sometimes I hear the closing line, instead.
INTERVIEWER
How do you actually write?
SONTAG
I write with a felt-tip pen, or sometimes
a pencil, on yellow or white legal pads, that fetish of American writers. I
like the slowness of writing by hand. Then I type it up and scrawl all over
that. And keep on retyping it, each time making corrections both by hand and
directly on the typewriter, until I don’t see how to make it any better. Up to
five years ago, that was it. Since then there is a computer in my life. After
the second or third draft it goes into the computer, so I don’t retype the
whole manuscript anymore, but continue to revise by hand on a succession of
hard-copy drafts from the computer.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything that helps you get
started writing?
SONTAG
Reading—which is rarely related to what
I’m writing, or hoping to write. I read a lot of art history, architectural
history, musicology, academic books on many subjects. And poetry. Getting
started is partly stalling, stalling by way of reading and of listening to
music, which energizes me and also makes me restless. Feeling guilty about not writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write every day?
SONTAG
No. I write in spurts. I write when I have
to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something
has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really
under way, I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t go out, much of the time I
forget to eat, I sleep very little. It’s a very undisciplined way of working
and makes me not very prolific. But I’m too interested in many other things.
INTERVIEWER
Yeats said famously that one must choose
between the life and the work. Do you think that is true?
SONTAG
As you know, he actually said that one
must choose between perfection of the life and perfection of the work. Well,
writing is a life—a very peculiar one. Of course,
if by life you mean life with other people, Yeats’s dictum is true. Writing
requires huge amounts of solitude. What I’ve done to soften the harshness of
that choice is that I don’t write all the time. I like to go out—which includes
traveling; I can’t write when I travel. I like to talk. I like to listen. I
like to look and to watch. Maybe I have an Attention Surplus Disorder. The
easiest thing in the world for me is to pay attention.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise as you go along or do you
wait until you have an entire draft and then revise the whole thing?
SONTAG
I revise as I go along. And that’s quite a
pleasurable task. I don’t get impatient and I’m willing to go over and over
something until it works. It’s beginnings that are hard. I always begin with a
great sense of dread and trepidation. Nietzsche says that the decision to start
writing is like leaping into a cold lake. Only when I’m about a third of the
way can I tell if it’s good enough. Then I have my cards, and I can play my
hand.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a difference between writing
fiction and writing essays?
SONTAG
Writing essays has always been laborious.
They go through many drafts, and the end result may bear little relation to the
first draft; often I completely change my mind in the course of writing an
essay. Fiction comes much easier, in the sense that the first draft contains
the essentials—tone, lexicon, velocity, passions—of what I eventually end up
with.
INTERVIEWER
Do you regret anything you’ve written?
SONTAG
Nothing in its entirety except two theater
chronicles I did in the mid-1960s for Partisan Review, and
unfortunately included in the first collection of essays, Against
Interpretation—I’m not suited for that kind of pugnacious,
impressionistic task. Obviously, I don’t agree with everything in the early
essays. I’ve changed, and I know more. And the cultural context that inspired
them has altogether changed. But there would be no point in modifying them now.
I think I would like to take a blue pencil to the first two novels, though.
INTERVIEWER
The Benefactor, which you wrote in your late twenties, is narrated
in the voice of a Frenchman in his sixties. Did you find it easy to impersonate
someone so different from yourself?
SONTAG
Easier than writing about myself. But
writing is impersonation. Even when I write about events in my own life, as I
did in “Pilgrimage” and “Project for a Trip to China,” it’s not really me. But
I admit that, with The Benefactor,
the difference was as broad as I could make it. I wasn’t celibate, I wasn’t a
recluse, I wasn’t a man, I wasn’t elderly, I wasn’t French.
INTERVIEWER
But the novel seems very influenced by
French literature.
SONTAG
Is it? It seems many people think that it
was influenced by the nouveau roman.
But I don’t agree. There were ironic allusions to two French books, hardly
contemporary ones: Descartes’s Meditations and Voltaire’s Candide.
But those weren’t influences. If there was an influence on The
Benefactor, though one I wasn’t at all conscious of at the time, it
was Kenneth Burke’s Towards a Better Life.
I reread Burke’s novel recently, after many decades (I may never have reread it
since he gave me a copy when I was sixteen), and discovered in its programmatic
preface what seems like a model for The Benefactor.
The novel as sequence of arias and fictive moralizing. The coquetry of a
protagonist—Burke dared to call his the novel’s hero—so ingeniously
self-absorbed that no reader could be tempted to identify with him.
INTERVIEWER
Your second novel, Death
Kit, is quite different from The Benefactor.
SONTAG
Death Kit invites identification with its miserable protagonist. I was in the
lamenting mood—it’s written in the shadow of the Vietnam war. It’s a book of
grief, veils and all.
INTERVIEWER
Hardly a new emotion in your work. Wasn’t
your first published story entitled “Man with a Pain”?
SONTAG
Juvenilia. You won’t find it in I,
etcetera.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come to write those theater
chronicles for Partisan Review?
SONTAG
Well, you have to understand that the
literary world then was defined by so-called small magazines—hard to imagine
because it’s so different now. My sense of literary vocation had been shaped by
reading literary magazines—Kenyon
Review, Sewanee Review, The Hudson Review, Partisan Review—at the end of the
1940s, while still in high school in Southern California. By the time I came to
New York in 1960, those magazines still existed. But it was already the end of
an era. Of course, I couldn’t have known that. My highest ambition had been and
still was to publish in one of these magazines, where five thousand people
would read me. That seemed to me very heaven.
Soon after I moved to New York, I saw
William Phillips at a party and got up my nerve to go over and ask him, How
does one get to write for Partisan Review?
He answered, You come down to the magazine and I give you a book to review on
spec. I was there the next day. And he gave me a novel. Not one I was
interested in, but I wrote something decent, and the review was printed. And so
the door was opened. But then there was some inappropriate fantasy, which I
tried to squelch, that I was going to be “the new Mary McCarthy”—as Phillips
made plain to me by asking me to do a theater chronicle. You know, Mary used to
do it, he said. I told him I didn’t want to write theater reviews. He insisted.
And so, much against my better judgment (I certainly had no desire to be the
new Mary McCarthy, a writer who’d never mattered to me), I did turn out two of
them. I reviewed plays by Arthur Miller and James Baldwin and Edward Albee and
said they were bad and tried to be witty and hated myself for doing it. After
the second round I told Phillips I couldn’t go on.
INTERVIEWER
But you did go on and write those famous
essays, some of which were published inPartisan
Review.
SONTAG
Yes, but those subjects were all of my own
choosing. I’ve hardly ever written anything on commission. I am not at all
interested in writing about work I don’t admire. And even among what I’ve
admired, by and large I’ve written only about things I felt were neglected or
relatively unknown. I am not a critic, which is something else than an essayist;
I thought of my essays as cultural work. They were written out of a sense of
what needed to be written.
I was assuming that a principal task of
art was to strengthen the adversarial consciousness. And that led me to reach
for relatively eccentric work. I took for granted that the liberal consensus
about culture—I was and am a great admirer of Lionel Trilling—would stay in
place, that the traditional canon of great books could not be threatened by
work that was more transgressive or playful. But taste has become so debauched
in the thirty years I’ve been writing that now simply to defend the idea of
seriousness has become an adversarial act. Just to be serious or to care about
things in an ardent, disinterested way is becoming incomprehensible to most people.
Perhaps only those who were born in the 1930s—and maybe a few stragglers—are
going to understand what it means to talk about art as opposed to art projects.
Or artists as opposed to celebrities. As you see, I’m chock-full of indignation
about the barbarism and relentless vacuity of this culture. How tedious always
to be indignant.
INTERVIEWER
Is it old-fashioned to think that the
purpose of literature is to educate us about life?
SONTAG
Well, it does educate us about life. I
wouldn’t be the person I am, I wouldn’t understand what I understand, were it
not for certain books. I’m thinking of the great question of nineteenth-century
Russian literature: how should one live? A novel worth reading is an education
of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature
is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.
INTERVIEWER
Do writing an essay and writing a piece of
fiction come from different parts of yourself?
SONTAG
Yes. The essay is a constrained form.
Fiction is freedom. Freedom to tell stories and freedom to be discursive, too.
But essayistic discursiveness, in the context of fiction, has an entirely
different meaning. It is always voiced.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as if you have pretty much
stopped writing essays.
SONTAG
I have. And most of the essays I’ve
succumbed to writing in the past fifteen years are requiems or tributes. The
essays on Canetti, Barthes, and Benjamin are about elements in their work and
sensibility that I feel close to: Canetti’s cult of admiration and hatred of
cruelty, Barthes’s version of the aesthete’s sensibility, Benjamin’s poetics of
melancholy. I was very aware that there’s much to be said about them that I
didn’t say.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, I can see that those essays are
disguised self-portraits. But weren’t you doing much the same thing in early
essays, including some of those in Against Interpretation?
SONTAG
I suppose it can’t be helped that it all
hangs together. Still, something else was going on in the essays that went into
the last collection, Under the Sign of Saturn.
I was having a kind of slow-motion, asymptomatic nervous breakdown writing
essays. I was so full of feeling and ideas and fantasies that I was still
trying to cram into the essay mode. In other words, I’d come to the end of what
the essay form could do for me. Maybe the essays on Benjamin, Canetti, and
Barthes were self-portraits, but they were also really fictions. My volcano
lover, the Cavaliere, is the fully realized fictional form of what I’d been
trying to say, in an impacted way, in the essay-portraits of Canetti and
Benjamin.
INTERVIEWER
Writing fiction, is your experience one of
inventing or figuring out a plot?
SONTAG
Oddly enough, the plot is what seems to
come all of a piece—like a gift. It’s very mysterious. Something I hear or see
or read conjures up a whole story in all its concreteness—scenes, characters,
landscapes, catastrophes. With Death Kit, it was
hearing someone utter the childhood nickname of a mutual friend named
Richard—just the hearing of the name Diddy. With The
Volcano Lover, it was browsing in a print shop near the British
Museum and coming across some images of volcanic landscapes that turned out to
be from Sir William Hamilton’s Phlegraei Campi.
For the new novel, it was reading something in Kafka’s diaries, a favorite
book, so I must have already read this paragraph, which may be an account of a
dream, more than once. Reading it this time the story of a whole novel, like a
movie I’d seen, leaped into my head.
INTERVIEWER
The whole story?
SONTAG
Yes, the whole story. The plot. But what
the story can carry or accumulate—that I discover in the writing. If The
Volcano Lover starts
in a flea market and ends with Eleonora’s beyond-the-grave monologue, it isn’t
as if I knew before I started writing all the implications of that journey,
which goes from an ironic, down-market vignette of a collector on the prowl to
Eleonora’s moral wide-shot view of the whole story that the reader has
experienced. Ending with Eleonora, and her denunciation of the protagonists, is
as far as you can get from the point of view with which the novel starts.
INTERVIEWER
At the beginning of your legendary essay
“Notes on Camp,” which appeared in 1964, you wrote that your attitude was one
of “deep sympathy modified by revulsion.” This seems a typical attitude of
yours: Both yes and no to camp. Both yes and no to photography. Both yes and no
to narrative . . .
SONTAG
It isn’t that I like it and I don’t like
it—that’s too simple. Or, if you will, it isn’t “both yes and no.” It’s “this
but also that.” I’d love to settle in on a strong feeling or reaction. But,
having seen whatever I see, my mind keeps on going and I see something else.
It’s that I quickly see the limitations of whatever I say or whatever judgment
I make about anything. There’s a wonderful remark of Henry James: “Nothing is
my last word on anything.” There’s always more to be said, more to be felt.
INTERVIEWER
I think most people might imagine that you
bring some theoretical agenda to fiction—if not as a writer of novels, at least
as a reader of them.
SONTAG
But I don’t. I need to care about and be
touched by what I read. I can’t care about a book that has nothing to
contribute to the wisdom project. And I’m a sucker for a fancy prose style. To
put it less giddily, my model for prose is poet’s prose; many of the writers I
most admire were poets when young or could have been poets. Nothing theoretical
in all that. In fact, my taste is irrepressibly catholic. I shouldn’t care to
be prevented from doting on Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt and Didion’s Democracy,
Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawkand
Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father.
INTERVIEWER
You’re mentioning a number of
contemporaries you admire. Would you also say you’ve been influenced by them?
SONTAG
Whenever I avow to being influenced, I’m
never sure I’m telling the truth. But here goes. I think I learned a lot about
punctuation and speed from Donald Barthelme, about adjectives and sentence
rhythms from Elizabeth Hardwick. I don’t know if I learned from Nabokov and
Thomas Bernhard, but their incomparable books help me keep my standards for
myself as severe as they ought to be. And Godard—Godard has been a major
nourishment to my sensibility and therefore, inevitably, to my writing. And
I’ve certainly learned something as a writer from the way Schnabel plays
Beethoven, Glenn Gould plays Bach, and Mitsuko Uchida plays Mozart.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read the reviews of your work?
SONTAG
No. Not even those I’m told are entirely
favorable. All reviews upset me. But friends give me a certain thumbs-up,
thumbs-down sense of what they are.
INTERVIEWER
After Death Kit you didn’t write much for a few years.
SONTAG
I’d been very active in the antiwar
movement since 1964, when it couldn’t yet be called a movement. And that took
up more and more time. I got depressed. I waited. I read. I lived in Europe. I
fell in love. My admirations evolved. I made some movies. I had a crisis of
confidence of how to write because I’ve always thought that a book should be
something necessary, and that each book by me should be better than the one
before. Punishing standards, but I’m quite loyal to them.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come to write On
Photography?
SONTAG
I was having lunch with Barbara Epstein of The
New York Review of Books in
early 1972 and going on about the Diane Arbus show at the Museum of Modern Art,
which I’d just seen, and she said, “Why don’t you write a piece about the
show?” I thought that maybe I could. And then when I began writing it I thought
that it should start with a few paragraphs about photography in general and
then move to Arbus. And soon there was a lot more than a few paragraphs, and I
couldn’t extricate myself. The essays multiplied—I felt often like the hapless
sorcerer’s apprentice—and they got harder and harder to write, I mean, to get
right. But I’m stubborn—I was on the third essay before I managed to place some
paragraphs about Arbus and the show—and, feeling I’d committed myself, wouldn’t
give up. It took five years to write the six essays that make up On
Photography.
INTERVIEWER
But you told me that you wrote your next
book, Illness as Metaphor, very fast.
SONTAG
Well, it’s shorter. One long essay, the
nonfiction equivalent of a novella. And being ill—while writing it I was a
cancer patient with a gloomy prognosis—was certainly very focusing. It gave me
energy to think I was writing a book that would be helpful to other cancer
patients and those close to them.
INTERVIEWER
All along you’d been writing stories . . .
SONTAG
Revving up for a novel.
INTERVIEWER
Soon after finishing The
Volcano Lover you
started another novel. Does that mean that you’re more drawn to longer, rather
than shorter, forms of fiction?
SONTAG
Yes. There are a few of my stories which I
like a lot—from I, etcetera,
“Debriefing” and “Unguided Tour,” and “The Way We Live Now,” which I wrote in
1987. But I feel more drawn to polyphonic narratives, which need to be long—or
longish.
INTERVIEWER
How much time did it take you to write The
Volcano Lover?
SONTAG
From the first sentence of the first draft
to the galleys, two and a half years. For me that’s fast.
INTERVIEWER
Where were you?
SONTAG
I started The
Volcano Lover in
September 1989 in Berlin, where I had gone to hang out thinking that I was
going to a place that was both very isolated and the Berkeley of Central
Europe. Although only two months after I arrived Berlin had started to become a
very different place, it still retained its main advantages for me—I wasn’t in
my apartment in New York with all my books, and I wasn’t in the place that I
was writing about either. That sort of double distancing works very well for
me.
About half of The
Volcano Lover was
written between late 1989 and the end of 1990 in Berlin. The second half was
written in my apartment in New York, except for two chapters that I wrote in a
hotel room in Milan (a two-week escapade) and another chapter that I wrote in
the Mayflower Hotel in New York. That was the Cavaliere’s deathbed interior
monologue, which I thought I had to write in one go, in complete isolation, and
knew—I don’t know how I knew—that I could do in three days. So I left my
apartment and checked into the hotel with my typewriter and legal-sized pads
and felt-tip pens, and ordered up BLTs until I was done.
INTERVIEWER
Did you write the novel in sequence?
SONTAG
Yes. I write chapter by chapter and I
don’t go on to the next chapter until the one I’m working on is in final form.
That was frustrating at first because from the beginning I knew much of what I
wanted the characters to say in the final monologues, but I feared that if I
wrote them early on I wouldn’t be able to go back to the middle. I was also
afraid that maybe by the time I got to it I would have forgotten some of the
ideas or no longer be connected to those feelings. The first chapter, which is
about fourteen typewritten pages, took me four months to write. The last five
chapters, some one hundred typewritten pages, took me two weeks.
INTERVIEWER
How much of the book did you have in mind
before you started?
SONTAG
I had the title; I can’t write something
unless I already know its title. I had the dedication; I knew I would dedicate
it to my son. I had the Così fan tutte epigraph. And of course I had the
story in some sense, and the span of the book. And what was most helpful, I had
a very strong idea of a structure. I took it from a piece of music, Hindemith’s The
Four Temperaments—a work I know very well, since it’s the music of
one of Balanchine’s most sublime ballets, which I’ve seen countless times. The
Hindemith starts with a triple prologue, three very short pieces. Then come
four movements—melancholic, sanguinic, phlegmatic, choleric. In that order. I
knew I was going to have a triple prologue and then four sections or parts
corresponding to the four temperaments—though I saw no reason to belabor the
idea by actually labeling Parts I to IV “melancholic,” “sanguinic,” etcetera. I
knew all of that, plus the novel’s last sentence: “Damn them all.” Of course, I
didn’t know who was going to utter it. In a sense, the whole work of writing
the novel consisted of making something that would justify that sentence.
INTERVIEWER
That sounds like a lot to know before
beginning.
SONTAG
Yes, but for all that I knew about it, I
still didn’t understand all that it could be. I started off thinking that The
Volcano Lover was the
story of the volcano lover, Sir William Hamilton, the man I call the Cavaliere;
that the book would stay centered on him. And I was going to develop the
character of the self-effacing first Lady Hamilton, Catherine, at the expense
of the story of his second wife, which everyone knows. I knew her story and the
relation with Nelson had to figure in the novel, but I intended to keep it in
the background. The triple prologue and Part I, with its many variations on the
theme of melancholy (or depression, as we call it)—the melancholy of the
collector, the ecstatic sublimation of that melancholy—all that went as
planned. Part I never leaves the Cavaliere. But then, when I started Part
II—which was to have variations on the theme of blood, from the sanguinic Emma,
this person bursting with energy and vitality, to the literal blood of the
Neapolitan revolution—Emma kidnapped the book. And that permitted the novel to
open out (the chapters got longer and longer) into a furor of storytelling and
of reflections about justice, war and cruelty. That was the end of the main
narrative, told in the third person. The rest of the novel was to be in the
first person. A very short Part III; the Cavaliere—delirious,
“phlegmatic”—enacts, in words, his dying. That went exactly as I’d imagined it,
but then I was back in the Cavaliere-centered world of Part I. There were more
surprises for me when I came to write the monologues of Part IV,
“choleric”—women, angry women, speaking from beyond the grave.
INTERVIEWER
Why beyond the grave?
SONTAG
A supplementary fiction, making it more
plausible that they are speaking with such insistent, heartfelt, heartbreaking
truthfulness. My equivalent of the unmediated, acutely rueful directness of an
operatic aria. And how could I resist the challenge of ending each monologue
with the character describing her own death?
INTERVIEWER
Were they always going to be all women?
SONTAG
Yes, definitely. I always knew the book
would end with women’s voices, the voices of some of the women characters in
the book, who would finally have their say.
INTERVIEWER
And give the woman’s point of view.
SONTAG
Well, you’re assuming that there is a
woman’s, or a female, point of view. I don’t. Your question reminds me that,
whatever their numbers, women are always regarded, are culturally constructed,
as a minority. It’s to minorities that we impute having a unitary point of
view. Lord, what do women want? Etcetera. Had I ended the novel with the voices
of four men, no one would suppose I was giving the male point of view; the differences
among the four voices would be too striking. These women are as different from
each other as any of four men characters in the novel I might have chosen. Each
retells the story (or part of it) already known to the reader from her own
point of view. Each has a truth to tell.
INTERVIEWER
Do they have anything in common?
SONTAG
Of course. They all know, in different
ways, that the world is run by men. So, with respect to the great public events
that have touched their lives, they have the insight of the disenfranchised to
contribute. But they don’t speak only about public events.
INTERVIEWER
Did you know who the women would be?
SONTAG
I knew pretty soon that the first three
beyond-the-grave monologues would be by Catherine, Emma’s mother, and Emma. But
I was already in the middle of writing Part II, Chapter 6 and boning up on the
Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, before I found the speaker of the fourth and
last monologue—Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, who makes a brief appearance
toward the end of that chapter, the narrative climax of the novel. And, finding
her, I finally understood the unwrapped gift of that last line, which I’d heard
in my head before I’d even started writing—that hers would be the voice that
had the right to utter it. The events, public and private, of her life, as well
as her atrocious death, follow the historical record, but her principles—her
ethical ardor—are the novelist’s invention. While I’d felt sympathy for the
characters in The Benefactor and Death Kit, what I
feel for the characters in The Volcano Lover is love (I had to borrow a stage
villain, Scarpia, to have one character in The Volcano Lover I didn’t love). But I can live with
their becoming small at the end. I mean, it is the end of the novel. I was thinking
in cinematic terms as I did throughout Part II, Chapter 6. Remember how so many
French films of the early 1960s ended with the camera in long shot starting to
pull back, and the character moving further and further into the rear of the
pictured space, becoming smaller and smaller as the credits start to roll. Seen
in the ethical wide shot that Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel provides, Nelson and
the Cavaliere and Emma should be judged as harshly as she judges them. Although
they do end badly in one way or another, they are extremely privileged, they’re
still winners—except for poor Emma, and even she has quite a ride for a while.
The last word should be given to someone who speaks for victims.
INTERVIEWER
There are so many voices—stories and
substories.
SONTAG
Until the late 1980s most of what I did in
fiction was going on inside a single consciousness, whether it was actually in
the first person like The Benefactor or nominally in the third person like Death
Kit. Until The Volcano Lover,
I wasn’t able to give myself permission to tell a story, a real story, as
opposed to the adventures of somebody’s consciousness. The key was this
structure that I borrowed from the Hindemith composition. I’d had the idea for
a long time that my third novel was going to have the title “The Anatomy of
Melancholy.” But I was resisting it—I don’t mean fiction, but that novel, whose story hadn’t yet been
given to me. But it’s obvious to me now that I didn’t really want to write it.
I mean a book written under the aegis of that title, which is just another way
of saying “under the sign of Saturn.” Most of my work had projected only one of
the old temperaments—melancholy. I didn’t want to write just about melancholy.
The musical structure, with its arbitrary order, freed me. Now I could do all
four.
With The Volcano Lover the door opened and I have a wider
entry. That’s the great struggle, for more access and more expressiveness,
isn’t it? You don’t—I’m adapting a phrase of Philip Larkin—write the novels you
really want to write. But I think I’m coming closer.
INTERVIEWER
It seems as if some of your essayistic
impulses are also part of the novel’s form.
SONTAG
I suppose it’s true that if you strung
together all the passages about collecting in The Volcano Lover you’d have a discontinuous, aphoristic
essay that might well stand on its own. Still, the degree of essayistic
speculation in The Volcano Lover seems restrained if compared with a
central tradition of the European novel. Think of Balzac and Tolstoy and
Proust, who go on for pages and pages that could really be excerpted as essays.
Or The Magic Mountain, perhaps the
thinkiest great novel of all. But speculation, rumination, direct address to
the reader are entirely indigenous to the novel form. The novel is a big boat.
It’s not so much that I was able to salvage the banished essayist in myself.
It’s that the essayist in me was only part of the novelist I’ve finally given
myself permission to be.
INTERVIEWER
Did you have to do a lot of research?
SONTAG
You mean reading? Yes, some. The me who is
a self-defrocked academic found that part of writing a novel set in the past
very pleasurable.
INTERVIEWER
Why set a novel in the past?
SONTAG
To escape the inhibitions connected with
my sense of the contemporary, my sense of how degraded and debased the way we
live and feel and think is now. The past is bigger than the present. Of course,
the present is always there too. The narrating voice of The
Volcano Lover is very
much of the late twentieth century, driven by late-twentieth-century concerns.
It was never my idea to write a “you are there” historical novel, even while it
was a matter of honor to make the historical substance of the novel as dense
and accurate as I could. It felt even more spacious that way. But having
decided to give myself one more romp in the past—with “In America,” the novel
I’m writing now—I’m not sure it will work out the same way this time.
INTERVIEWER
When is it set?
SONTAG
From the mid-1870s almost to the end of
the nineteenth century. And, like The Volcano Lover,
it’s based on a real story, that of a celebrated Polish actress and her
entourage who left Poland and went to Southern California to create a Utopian
community. The attitudes of my principal characters are wonderfully exotic to
me—Victorian, if you will. But the America they arrive in is not so exotic,
though I’d thought that to set a book in late-nineteenth-century America would
feel almost as remote as late-eighteenth-century Naples and London. It’s not.
There is an astonishing continuity of cultural attitudes in our country. I
never cease to be surprised that the America Tocqueville observed in the early
1830s is, in most respects, recognizably the America of the end of the
twentieth century—even though the demographic and ethnographic composition of
the country has totally changed. It’s as if you had changed both the blade and
handle of a knife and it is still the same knife.
INTERVIEWER
Your play, Alice
in Bed, is also about a late-nineteenth-century sensibility.
SONTAG
Yes—Alice James plus the nineteenth
century’s most famous Alice, Lewis Carroll’s. I was directing a production of
Pirandello’s As You Desire Me in Italy, and one day Adriana Asti,
who played the lead, said to me—dare I say it?—playfully, Please write a play
for me. And remember, I have to be onstage all the time. And then Alice James,
thwarted writer and professional invalid, fell into my head, and I made up the
play on the spot and told it to Adriana. But I didn’t write it for another ten
years.
INTERVIEWER
Are you going to write more plays? You’ve
always been very involved with theater.
SONTAG
Yes. I hear voices. That’s why I like to
write plays. And I’ve lived in the world of theater artists for much of my
life. When I was very young, acting was the only way I knew how to insert
myself into what happens on a stage: starting at ten, I was taken on for some
kiddie roles in Broadway plays put on by a community theater (this was in
Tucson); I was active in student theater—Sophocles, Shakespeare—at the
University of Chicago; and in my early twenties did a bit of summer stock. Then
I stopped. I’d much rather direct plays (though not my own). And make films (I
hope to make better ones than the four I wrote and directed in Sweden, Israel,
and Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s). And direct operas, which I haven’t done
yet. I’m very drawn to opera—the art form that most regularly and predictably
produces ecstasy (at least in this opera lover). Opera is one of the
inspirations of The Volcano Lover—stories
from operas and operatic emotions.
INTERVIEWER
Does literature produce ecstasy?
SONTAG
Sure, but less reliably than music and
dance; literature has more on its mind. One must be strict with books. I want
to read only what I’ll want to reread—the definition of a book worth reading
once.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever go back and reread your work?
SONTAG
Except to check translations, no.
Definitely no. I’m not curious. I’m not attached to the work I’ve already done.
Also, perhaps I don’t want to see how it’s all the same. Maybe I’m always
reluctant to reread anything I wrote more than ten years ago because it would
destroy my illusion of endless new beginnings. That’s the most American part of
me: I feel that it’s always a new start.
INTERVIEWER
But your work is so diverse.
SONTAG
Well it’s supposed to be diverse, though
of course there is a unity of temperament, of preoccupation—certain
predicaments, certain emotions that recur—ardor and melancholy. And an
obsessive concern with human cruelty, whether cruelty in personal relations or
the cruelty of war.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think your best work is still to
come?
SONTAG
I hope so. Or . . . yes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think much about the audience for
your books?
SONTAG
Don’t dare. Don’t want to. But, anyway, I
don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.
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