Stand Aside, Sisyphus

By Richard Lacayo

The strangest pitch that anyone threw this summer in Bull Durham was a curve ball that Kevin Costner delivered to Susan Sarandon. In the midst of a romantic face-off, he announced that "the novels of Susan Sontag are self- indulgent, overrated crap." Sarandon was so surprised -- Who was talking literature? -- that it took a few scenes before she hit the pitch back: "I think Susan Sontag is brilliant!" So there. Alerted by friends to this great debate, the flesh-and-blood Sontag left Bull Durham off her must-see list. She well remembered watching a French-Canadian film, The Decline of the American Empire, a few years ago. In that one, a plump Casanova confides that the woman he most wants to sleep with is . . . Susan Sontag. Out in the audience, the startled woman of his dreams grimaced. "It was like somebody threw a spitball at me in the theater."

If Sontag's name finds its way into some unlikely exchanges, it may be a sign that intellect is not just a target but a magnet, a fascination even in a culture more preoccupied with stadium bruisers and nymphets. At 55, she has been one of the most visible intellectual figures in American life for more than two decades. In two novels, a collection of short stories and five volumes of essays, Sontag has come to symbolize the writer and thinker in many variations: as analyst, rhapsodist and roving eye, as public scold and portable conscience. In private, she can be funny and informal, tilting her head sideways when she laughs, so that the band of gray in her hair fans out like a comet's tail. But on the page, she emanates an implacable gravity, a command of literature and philosophy that leaves one riveted, if also a bit self-reproachful. While you were flipping channels, it seems, she was laboring under the burden of consciousness. While you were rooting for the Dodgers, she was sifting through Artaud. "Reading is my television," she once said. For most people, it's the other way around.

Sontag doesn't own a TV, though she did rent one last month to please a houseguest. (Regarding it with the look of a bird that has found a meteor plunked in her nest, she shrugs, "I haven't turned it on yet.") She also has no phone-answering machine, no word processor and, in most of her two-bedroom New York City duplex, no air conditioning. The coolest spot in the place is likely to be the sun-room that opens onto a small terrace. That was where she spent much of the past summer, with its Egyptian heat and rain-forest humidity, penning in revisions on the typed manuscript of her first entirely new book in a decade.

AIDS and Its Metaphors, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in January, examines the way the epidemic is thought about and discussed. She conceived it as a sequel to Illness As Metaphor, the 1978 work that emerged from her experience with breast cancer, a mastectomy and years of chemotherapy. The earlier book, by tracing myths that had attached themselves to tuberculosis and cancer, brilliantly discredited notions -- like that of the pent-up, "cancer-prone" personality -- that add senseless guilt and shame to the burdens patients already carry. "But it's much more common now for people to be candid about cancer," she says "because there's a new disease to hang all your fantasies and phobias on -- AIDS."

In August, Sontag spent a long week at a hospital bedside watching helplessly as the epidemic claimed another friend. "It's like a nightmare," she says. The new book, however, is intended to go beyond sympathy and outrage. "What interested me was what AIDS means for the way people think about illness," she explains. "One way for people to defend themselves against what is painful and frustrating in modern life is to have fantasies of disaster. AIDS is the latest script of that disaster."

It's typical of Sontag that she would turn a personal preoccupation into an occasion for larger reflections. Her collected work is a map of her consuming passions: the French writer Roland Barthes, the German critic Walter Benjamin, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. (In her spare time, she has directed four films abroad.) All her work aims at defining a vaporous but crucial notion, the modern sensibility. She combines a metropolitan taste, omnivorous and hard to satisfy, with a transatlantic mind, drawn to European writers and filmmakers. Often she discusses them in the European form of fragments and epigrams. "I get impatient with linear forms in which you go from a to b to c." she explains. "It takes too long. I love to go faster."

It was while briskly patrolling the outer edges of modernity in the early 1960s that Sontag became suddenly, improbably famous, for her essay "Notes on 'Camp,' " a meticulous exertion of reason applied to an apparently weightless topic: the enthusiasm for silly extravagance, for the likes of Busby Berkeley and Mae West. "Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style," she wrote. But more than that, "It incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy."

By taking seriously a taste that valued aesthetics over morality, Sontag offended American critics trained to sort through works of art for their moral messages. So be it -- they were the ones she had in mind when, in another famous essay, she declared herself "against interpretation." In her view, interpretation had become a means to reduce unruly art and literature to its manageable "content," a way of rendering art's raw power more digestible. She wanted more attention paid to art's sensual capabilities, to the way it works upon consciousness through the imprint of its form and surfaces. It was all summed up in her famous phrase: "Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art."

Sontag's first two collections of essays, Against Interpretation and Styles ) of Radical Will, also made her a crucial guide to the intentions of the avant- garde. She attacked Anglo-American fiction for being "deeply, if not irrevocably, compromised by philistinism," for clinging to realism instead of pursuing experimental technique, as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein had done. In all, the effect of her complaints was electric, a bracing shot at some of the more complacent positions in American thought. But her critics accused her of trendiness, of bowing to Europe, of hostility to art's moral purposes. They charged that she equated art with style and made thought subordinate to sensuality.

As far as Sontag is concerned, her positions have been parodied. She winces at being pegged as a reckless advocate of writers at the edge of madness or extremity. Her essays, she says, give "a skewed notion of my taste" because she only discussed figures about whom she felt more needed to be said. "And the last thing in the world that I am is anti-intellectual. Even in the most high-spirited, somewhat simplifying formulations in some of those essays -- after all, I was in my 20s and full of combative spirit -- I was defending a much more serious approach." She did not declare that art has no moral purpose, she sighs. Her point was merely that art and morality are not the same thing, that their interactions are complex. As for equating high and popular culture, she explains, "I made a few jolly references to things in popular culture that I enjoyed. I said, for instance, one could enjoy both Jasper Johns and the Supremes. It isn't as if I wrote an essay on the Supremes."

Sontag recalls herself as "a psychologically abandoned child." Until she was six, she and her younger sister were raised mostly by aunts, in the New York area. Her parents, Polish Jews who came to the U.S. while young, spent most of their time in China, where her father was a fur trader. After his death there from tuberculosis, her mother returned to the U.S. and remarried. (Sontag uses her stepfather's last name.) In time, the new family ended up living in Canoga Park, near Los Angeles, though it would be truer to say that Sontag lived in books. The most ardent reader at North Hollywood High School, alma mater of Alan Ladd and Farley Granger, she graduated at 15 and made for the University of Chicago. (She would later do graduate work at Harvard and Oxford.) At 17 she married sociologist Philip Rieff, then a 28-year-old instructor, just ten days after she met him. The marriage, which lasted seven years, was her first and last. It produced a son, David, now 36, an editor and writer in Manhattan and another of his mother's consuming passions.

The paradox of Sontag is that she is an ardent modernist with the earnestness -- and superabundant energy -- of a Victorian moralist. If she likes to "go faster," it's partly because she has so much to cram in. In August, for instance, she attended the biennial gathering of the writers group PEN International (she is president of PEN's American chapter) in Seoul and managed to infuriate Korean authorities by insistently raising the issue of imprisoned South Korean writers. Late September brought the New York Film Festival premiere of Sarah, a documentary on Sarah Bernhardt that Sontag narrates, and a week of public readings, including a benefit for writers and editors with AIDS.

Politically Sontag describes herself as a social democrat. But in the 1960s, amid the revulsion aroused by the Viet Nam War, she traveled to Havana and Hanoi and wrote about both places sympathetically, though not without misgivings. Read today, the mismatch in those essays between her complex inquiries and the nostrums of Communism is palpable. Her lingering reputation as a leftist, however, explains the fire storm she set off with a brief speech six years ago at a New York City forum to voice support for Poland's Solidarity labor union. Though the session had been organized by a coalition of left-wing activists, she delivered a biting denunciation of the Soviet system and called to task those who had not acknowledged sooner that "Communism is fascism with a human face."

Newspapers around the world dissected the event for weeks afterward. The left attacked her as a pawn of the right and the right as a latecomer to anti- Communism. Sontag was stunned by the response, especially the assumption that her rejection of Communism was a recent development or that it signaled a sharp move rightward on her part. As early as 1971, she points out, she was protesting Cuba's imprisonment of writers like the poet Heberto Padilla, now a friend living in the U.S. She also insists that her views are not the result of the close friendships she has formed with writers in exile from Communism, including Czeslaw Milosz of Poland and Joseph Brodsky of the Soviet Union, both Nobel laureates. But their situation is never far from her thoughts. Her first novel in nearly a quarter-century, which she has almost completed and calls The Western Half, is about Polish and Soviet emigres in Paris, New York and Midwestern academe.

Sontag's earlier novels have met a mixed reception, and not just in Bull Durham. Though she builds an absorbing puzzle in The Benefactor (1963), in parts of Death Kit (1967) the scientific instrument of her prose is never quite equal to a musical instrument of the imagination. But in her more recent short stories, many of them collected in I, etcetera (1978), she triumphs, neatly drawing thought into the shapes of feeling. At the end of the story Debriefing, about the psychic perils of city life, she even makes what could be a gently funny summation of her own doggedness:

"Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don't have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up -- up, up. And . . . down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I'm on my feet again. See, I'm starting to roll it up again. Don't try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock."

For decades, Sontag has been resolving to devote all her time to fiction -- and failing. "Essay writing is part of an addiction that I'm trying to kick. My last essay is like my last cigarette." She quit smoking two years ago, but there's still one more essay she plans to turn out, this one about intellectuals and Communism, taking as its point of departure the disillusioning trip that the writer Andre Gide made to the Soviet Union in 1936. And then there's a short book on Japan. And then . . . Well, at least the tube won't be distracting her. The houseguest has departed, and the men have come to retrieve the rented TV. "I did watch a bit of it," she admits. "But I couldn't watch much. The thing about television is, it goes too slow."