I’m Not Just A Writer, I’m A PersonAn Interview with Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag has always represented the avant-garde. Although primarily known as an essayist (‘On Interpretation,’ ‘On Photography,’ ‘AIDS and its Metaphors’) she began her career as a novelist with the very abstract and French-influenced The Benefactor in 1964. This was followed by Death Kit in 1967. Ironic, melancholy and hallucinatory, it pursues formal experiment within a black and often hilarious satire on the life of US corporate man.

Her third novel The Volcano Lover (1992) marked a change. It is a graphic and mostly realist account of a group of expatriates becoming caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution in Naples. The volcano presides over a bloody collision of self and other on a scale that is both intimate and stupendous. In America (2000), by contrast, refuses pessimism or metaphors of upheaval in its story of migration from Poland in the nineteenth century.

The historic realism of both recent novels is challenged by two things: an ironic introduction by a modern narrator, and closure with the form Sontag has now made her own – the long monologue in summation of a life. Characters hitherto deeply involved with others now stand alone, delivering an apologia or plainly speaking difficult truths. In Volcano Lover we hear from Lord Nelson, his lover Emma Hamilton, and the young revolutionary Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel – after their deaths. In America closes with the famous American actor Edward Booth. In these accounts, Sontag’s famous irony seems to have met its match.

Eden Liddelow: In your novel Death Kit – which appeared in 1967 – you wrote about the hero Diddy: ‘Diddy the Depressed. How hard it is to say anything just for itself. With the best will in the world you find you’re saying it for someone.’ As Eva Ziarek says, melancholy is an excess of alterity. But it is difficult to say things just for yourself. Is this tension the basis for the four monologues at the end of Volcano Lover, and the one at the end of In America? They’re speaking directly to the camera, they’ve got a bit of distance.

Susan Sontag: I wish I could be the first author to say all my books are anatomies of melancholy. But I feel that to be true. However there was a sea-change between the writer who wrote Death Kit and the writer who wrote Volcano Lover and In America.

When I conceived of The Volcano Lover, it was as if great doors had swung open. For the first time I could put into a book a lot of what I know and feel, and I have never felt like that before. I’d felt everything I wrote represented some corner of what I felt, and after all what every writer wants is to touch every word in the language – but I never had that triumphant feeling that I got from Volcano Lover. If I went back to who it was who wrote Death Kit – the writer – I wouldn’t change that much as a person, but I feel I have changed as a writer. But then again a reader such as yourself will see continuities where I see discontinuities. Which allows me to feel I’m beginning again each time. It’s a necessary illusion.

What I must have meant by the distinction between speaking for others and speaking for itself, yourself, was contained implicitly in an idea of greater truthfulness. Not a refusal of dialogue, but a sense that to speak for others is to speak less than truthfully – out of fear of the others and what they can do to you, out of consideration, compassion, overdeveloped empathy. If you could speak only for it or itself or yourself this would be a chance to say something more truthful. That feeling has abated in me as a writer – not in me as a person: I often feel when I speak to someone that I’m speaking less than truthfully because I’m shaping what I say – to be civil, to be kind, to communicate, to be liked. All sorts of things.

And if one didn’t have the rebound into one’s solitary self, one wouldn’t know what thoughts were real. So for me as a person that’s a reality. As a writer, I adore the feeling that I’m addressing others when I write. I’m not aware of ‘the other’ when I write. I used to answer so easily when someone asked me, ‘For whom do you write?’ I’d say, ‘For literature,’ or ‘I write for people who like what I write,’ or ‘I don’t write for anyone, I just try to do my best.’ All these phrases came easily to me – and sincerely. Now I have a better way of explaining it. I take immense pleasure out of people’s responses to what I write, which I had never allowed myself to feel. I didn’t understand it.

Volcano Lover felt to me like a turning point in my life. About the four monologues: the characters were dead so they could tell the truth, they had nothing to lose. They could be totally honest. It’s not just that they’re not speaking to anybody – there’s nothing they can do. It’s over and it can’t be changed. It’s that now they can tell the truth – and the truth beneath the truth, it isn’t that there’s one truth. To take the emotionally simplest character – Mrs Cadogan – it’s full of contradictions. She’s a naïve woman, who has to speak of herself – ‘My daughter, my daughter, my daughter.’

EL: You wrote in your essay of 1979, ‘Under the Sign of Saturn,’ that ‘the saturnine temperament is an unforgiving relation to the self, which can never be taken for granted – it is a text that must be deciphered.’ Then I heard an interview with you in 1982 in which you said that you’d given yourself up to the directness of emotions in opera – someone is up there on stage saying, as in the letter scene from Eugene Onegin, ‘I cannot forgive you I die I love.’ Is opera an escape from the unforgiving relation to the self?

SS: Yes. I think of opera as blessedly – and absurdly, often – direct. So yes. The hyperexpressiveness of it – I had immense pleasure from it and hadn’t understood why. Until a production of Eugene Onegin. I want to say, ‘doesn’t one,’ but I should say ‘don’t I’ long to have some of that directness! There was an opera character in Volcano Lover; and then it became a private joke, so I have another Puccini character in In America. It begins in 1875; it’s about a group of Poles who go to America but the most important person in this group is the most famous actress in Poland. Their fantasy is Brook Farm and artists’ colonies and living like noble savages; and they settle in Southern California and she goes back on the stage and becomes the most famous actress in America, Polish accent and all. Anyway, early on in her return to the stage she goes to a mining town, on a tour, and then she meets Minnie, who’s another Puccini character from The Girl of the Golden West – so I had my second character. And then, in this trilogy of novels that take place in the past, the third novel is about Japan. Madama Butterfly’s son is a character in the novel! My Puccini trilogy – it’s a private homage to opera, and to Puccini – who is not a first rate composer – no serious lover of music thinks he’s one of the great composers, like Mozart – but it’s a deliberate homage to the expressiveness, the rank expressiveness, the eloquence of opera.

EL: Still on the monologues; in a sense they’re like group photos. You wrote once, ‘Strictly speaking one never understands anything from a photo – only that which narrates can make us understand. It is a world which denies interconnectedness, continuity – but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery.’ For me, for all that these monologues communicate and narrate directly, they are so mysterious, like photos. Primarily, of course, because we don’t know where they are.

SS: Yes, well that’s the stipulated fantasy – voices de l’au-delà, de l’outre-tombe. They’re nowhere, they’re just voices. No, I think it’s precisely the opposite of the photograph. I found these monologues intensely moving to write. At the execution of Eleanora Pimentel I actually wept. I also cried at the end when Emma sends her daughter to get the priest. What most pleased me was when people said, ‘I cried!’ I’d say, ‘Thank you so much, I cried too.’ The monologue – that’s the payoff, that’s what all leads to. Someone can finally say, ‘This is what I really feel, this is what I was in real life.’ A whirlwind of emotion.

This new novel begins with a monologue and ends with a monologue. The Prologue both introduces the story and is a parable about fictional imagination – how you imagine something, how you construct your story, how you invent. Then there’s some sort of authored ‘I’ who follows things in my life – obviously not identical, she’s not clever, this person in the Prologue. It ends with one long monologue, about thirty five pages. He’s a man who makes the most glancing appearance in the book; he has the final word. This idea of having the final word go to him – over the top emotionally, very emotionally violent and passionate, an account of someone who is profoundly unhappy – is a very different narrative method. There isn’t an omniscient voice. It’s a bit of a handicap. I like the omniscient voice, dancing around, making contemporary references. I gave that up, I renounced that. I’d like nothing better than to write the same book over again, with a different story! But – ! It’s very hard to detach from that.

EL: Nadine Gordimer writes a lot about the writer’s relation to society – the need to be left alone and at the same time have a vital connection with others. Do you feel this, and is it difficult if that connection leads to political commitment?

SS: I’m not sure I have political commitment but I certainly have moral commitments, which take me into situations which people define politically. I spent a good part of three years in Sarajevo in the time of siege, from 1993 to 1996, there half the time, going back and forth. I just felt it was my duty to do something, doing that as opposed to running to other horrible situations which one might be drawn to; bear witness, or to be helpful. That was very much an accident. In a certain sense I have a connection to the Balkans, though nothing in my life or background has to do with that – my son who is a writer had gone there to write a book about the war. Which he did, successfully. He said ‘You should see this, you should come,’ – so I got myself there. It was very difficult – getting credentials – and gruesome and dangerous. I didn’t write about it, partly out of respect for my son – I didn’t want to upstage him, he has written extensively about his involvement with Kosovo, Macedonia. That’s what he does. What I did was personal. That takes up a lot of time. To tell you the truth, I’m a bit more interested in doing things politically – or what I would call moral actions – as a person, putting myself in a place where I can do something – as a human being, not as a famous writer.

The classic struggle: of course the writer is alone. It’s voluntary house arrest. Cocteau said you can never be alone enough – his fantasy being some basement where people would leave the food outside the door.

I don’t write when I travel – I can’t. During the three years in and out of Sarajevo, the greatest sacrifice was that I couldn’t write because I’d be back here for a month, going back there for a month or two, and I was so obsessed by what I’d experienced and seen. And when I was here I did a lot – making arrangements for refugees – so that didn’t leave much out of the three years. What can I say? I’m not just a writer, I’m a person. As a human being I have to do things – I think more of my duties as a human being than as a writer – but as a writer of course I want only to be left alone. I’m never alone in the true sense because I have books. Thousands of books – a great swarm of dialogues with minds, most of whom are dead. I don’t have strong relations with contemporary writers, with a few exceptions, one of whom is Nadine Gordimer.

EL: In one of her essays she paid tribute to you for your courage and honesty in admitting publicly that writers on the left had been insufficiently critical of the faults of socialist regimes. But she goes on to ask whether it is really inconceivable that socialism can ever be achieved without horror.

SS: That’s too abstract for me. I actually think very concretely. I think it’s very important to tell the truth. I try to tell the truth. That’s always a sacred duty. And I’m not attached to the idea of self-expression, that is, that I am expressing myself. As a writer, as Marguerite Duras does, whom I knew a little. Her work is about herself and her own consciousness. I’m not at all drawn to that idea. I know I’m the medium of what I do – I draw on myself, I can’t step over my feet. That’s not the point. I’m not drawn to Duras’s work, it doesn’t mean much to me. I read French – I’m bilingual – the music is seductive sometimes, but sometimes it’s too small a world. By which I don’t mean you can’t just write out of your own experience – that you can’t have, so to speak, a small voice. There are wonderful writers with small voices – Jean Rhys is an example. I love her work. She’s not a big, ambitious voice – but she is writing about more than herself even when she seems to be writing about herself. Whereas I feel Duras isn’t; it’s egocentric in a way I find unattractive.

EL: Have you read La Douleur? It does move outwards. Could I ask a few things about language? There are these sliced verbal forms, supines and gerunds. ‘Diddy bored (now).’ ‘Diddy sitting in the compartment.’ I’m wondering if it’s a cinematic vision, that says ‘CUT to…Diddy sitting in the compartment.’ Your books are about seeing – the camera hijacks the fictional language.

SS: I’m sure I’m profoundly influenced by cinematic philosophy. I always find the first pages of a book incredibly difficult to write. I can spend six months on the first ten pages, but I can spend six weeks on the last fifty pages. By the end of the book you have your plan. And, when I think about that struggle to begin, I think of two things: I have to establish the lexicon for the book and I have to establish a kind of philosophy – how fast the book is going to go, what kind of energy it’s going to have – and I think about those first notions – they’re accentuated by the fact that I certainly have had more pleasure from movies than from books of fiction in the last thirty years. I’m an endless re-reader, but when I pull down a book for re-reading it’s not often a book written now. What I’ve read the last couple of months just for pleasure – it’s the heroic period: Henry James, Tolstoy, Balzac.

The last new book I read through from first word to last is not a novel in prose but in verse, Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune. The last book I read from start to finish – new contemporary book. Otherwise – opera books – the heroic, the age of heroic narrative, which is the late eighteenth, nineteenth, the first third of the twentieth century. I love Les Murray’s work – I introduced him recently in New York. On several occasions.

EL: I like listening to him talk almost as much as reading him – the gems he produces just in passing. I reach for my pen, I have to write them down.

SS: He’s a dazzling writer, dazzling.

EL: Coming back to your language: there is a zoom sentence, where a switch from past to present tense – sometimes in mid-sentence – is like the action of the zoom lens of the camera at moments of change or particular tension. As Benjamin said – ‘The need to bring things spatially and humanly nearer is almost an obsession today – the close-up.’

SS: It’s not movies as such – it’s very specific directors who’ve entered my bloodstream. That’s exactly what it is, I’ve tried to explain it to myself, never successfully. It’s the zoom.

EL: But what it does is influence space and time. Speed things up.

SS: That’s an element of his idea of the close-up. I don’t think my own concerns, much as I revere him, are mediated by Benjamin’s ideas, but the concept is of course the great convention of the cinema – the cinema image as opposed to what still photography did before the invention of the cinema. I think that’s an analogy rather than describing directly what I did but because I feel my limitation as a writer – I’m acutely aware of it and hope to live long enough to reduce this. I don’t think I’m a great describer of the physical world, which is something I admire intensely among certain writers – Lawrence, Hardy, Tolstoy of course, other writers – but what I’m really good at is describing consciousness. And I wish I’d had more skills at the start. I’m working on it but I’m not good at describing spatial relationships.

EL: But we don’t need any more descriptions of spatial relationships.

SS: I’ll tell you a writer who has come to be a model for me – and as much as I always liked her I never thought of her as a model – and that’s Virginia Woolf. There are things in Mrs Dalloway and the first part of To the Lighthouse which are so stupendously moving and concise and direct and crazy – Septimus says it all. Not just the character of Septimus but also some of the descriptions. I’ve always loved Woolf but I’d never got close to her.

EL: Something that seems to have an affinity with Woolf in your work and Nadine Gordimer’s is male protagonists – the desire of the writer to be both genders.

SS: All three of us are very old-fashioned feminists! To me this is feminism, but a lot of people don’t see it that way at all. I just sort of take it for granted. Henry James created some very important women. Talking about describing – one of the things I adore about Nadine Gordimer’s fiction is her way of describing erotic situations.

EL: She’s so good!

SS: She’s the best. It’s not sexy – it’s really described. It sounds so prudish – I don’t mean language shouldn’t be vulgar, but she doesn’t lean on vulgar language to carry the weight, rude words for sexual parts and acts. I just mean that a lot of writers nowadays think they’re describing something sexy just if they use the ordinary words. It’s never that; it’s really sexy, what she does, and it’s really described. Just talk about a man’s bottom – I can’t remember, it’s like six words…

EL: ‘His clean equine rump,’ from Burger’s Daughter.

SS: Exactly. Isn’t it wonderful?

EL: It’s Chabalier. In The Conservationist, there’s page after page describing a woman on a plane and what a man’s hand is doing to her under the blanket. It’s delirious. Women’s experience described by men. Written by a woman.

SS: I love to admire it when it’s someone I care about. There’s a moment in The Late Bourgeois World where she goes to tell her son that his father has been killed. He’s called out of school, she embraces him, and she smells the sweat of a child entering puberty which has turned from something very sweet, that smell of perspiration that children have, to something more acrid, when the hormones kick in at around thirteen. Oh! When she embraces him, she knows he’s no longer a child. You know how right that is, how truthful it is. That’s indeed what life is like. It’s that concreteness. You know what I mean, it’s that concreteness.

EL: Just going back to the way your language describes consciousness, as you say. In Death Kit there is frequent use of the word ‘now,’ but in brackets, and I feel it’s in brackets because the new perception is an illusion, it’s an illusion that anything is going forward, that there’s any real change.

SS: Because it isn’t so, because the whole book is a hallucination. Can you understand – you are obviously one of my very best readers – understand what I have trouble understanding, why I waited so long to write another novel – and don’t think I didn’t start four novels, that I started, that I left – between Death Kit and Volcano Lover.

The point is to not to have industrial weight of productivity. The point is to write a couple of books that will be read fifty years from now, that’s all I want. I mean think of – I don’t know – Charlotte Bronte. Jane Eyre and Villette. That’s all, that’s the lot. I love Jane Eyre, too, I read it as a child, it’s one of those formative books. The important thing is to write one or two or three books people will want to read. And I’d think, it’s not good enough, not different enough, it’s not big enough. And then when I got the idea – everyone says, how did you get the idea? – it just fell into my head (I think of ten stories a day). It’s preposterous, a Polish actress who starts farming in Southern California in 1876, and then goes back on the stage – why did I know that I could do something with this? But I like stories about foreigners, I like the condition of being foreign. I get a lot out of feeling not eternal.

EL: Coming to New York from Europe I felt so much more foreign. I was very aware of Bernard Shaw’s idea that the British and the Americans are divided by a common language.

SS: But New York is a big international city, it’s like a big ship anchored off the coast of America. It’s not like the rest of the country. If I couldn’t live in Manhattan I wouldn’t live in the United States. I like New York precisely because it’s not America. It’s a very peculiar ship – with everybody on it. The borough of Queens has one hundred and eighty seven different languages spoken by children in schools, the immigrants there are from more different countries than anywhere else on the planet. This doesn’t mean one hundred and eighty seven different countries, it’s actually many more, because Spanish is spoken in so many countries. And I remember once during a bombardment in Sarajevo, constant of course, huddling in a basement, a very clever guy – perfect English, worked in television – and he said to me ‘What do you think of us? What do you make of us?’ subtracting the war, which is of course absurd, one can’t control every second of one’s existence. I said to him that everyone was white and everyone was or was pretending to be heterosexual. He roared with laughter, ‘I see what you mean.’ Because the Balkans are among the last all-white areas in Europe. No-one ever emigrates from Africa or North Africa or anywhere else to go and live in Sarajevo and so it’s one hundred per cent white and then of course being a very old-fashioned place everyone who’s gay is totally in the closet. Being a smart guy he knew exactly what I meant.

Whereas here everyone’s kind of surprising. Just yesterday I met Ben – my secretary – close to his apartment which is on the East Side, 2nd Avenue and 3rd St, and I was looking for an apartment for my Italian translator, who’s an academic and spending a sabbatical year getting all my things translated – and every person seemed to me so odd, so eccentric, so done up, performing in different ways – appearance, tattoos, metal in the face, hair colouring, girth, clothes – a very striking experience.

You should spend a little more time here!

EL: I’d like to redefine the term ‘saturnine’ that you used for melancholy. The ‘saturnine’ could be more adaptive than melancholy.

Julia Kristeva talks about the use of melancholy as an example for young people. ‘The individual threatened by the new maladies of the soul seeks a meeting with an experience – of someone who has “made her journey to the end of the night, fully aware of having lost the self, and got it back in some form.” The speech it draws from that experience is a new knowledge.’ That coming out of melancholy – it’s like Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel in Volcano Lover. Her situation is terrible, she’s going to her execution, but she is able to say ‘Perhaps one day even this will be a joy to recall.’

SS: Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? Of course a great deal of the novel is totally invented, especially everyone’s thoughts, but there was a real Eleanora and she did say that. That’s why she’s in the book. That somebody could say that – I had to inhabit that person and I’ve put into her a lot of myself. Just that! About to be executed, to undergo something so atrocious. It’s so great, so – noble. That’s the thing that’s gone out of our consciousness and largely out of our art. This nobility.

EL: Classical?

SS: I don’t know if it’s classical – of course it has anti-republican associations from the word go but we don’t have a better word for it. But it’s the notion of being totally beyond oneself in the most generous way, that’s what’s great.

Just this morning I was reading the New York Times – Baudelaire said there’s nothing more grotesque than to read the newspaper first thing when you wake up, having a daily diet of vulgarity and horror – but anyway, some article was saying that of course in the 90s greed was taken for granted. It’s not that you actually have to say your primary intent is making money – it’s absolutely taken for granted, and you’re consequently insane if that isn’t your primary intent. First of all it’s not true. I know lots of people for whom it’s not the main thing.

If you were to ask me in my long life what is the greatest single change I’ve seen, I’d say it’s the death of high-mindedness. The notion of sacrifice – that you can be moved in certain circumstances to sacrifice yourself – this is an idea which is unintelligible today. They haven’t the faintest idea what you mean. They think you’re insane.

EL: The New Age wants worship as part of ‘spirituality,’ in quotes. But Gandhi said, in his marvellous list of checks and balances, ‘There can be no worship without sacrifice.’

SS: There’s no sacrifice at all! Just personal, wonderful, personal performing. When I told people in New York I’d come back from a great deal of time in Sarajevo they’d say, ‘But isn’t it dangerous?’

I said, ‘It couldn’t be more dangerous!’

‘Then why are you doing it?’

I said, ‘Can’t you ever imagine doing something dangerous because you felt there was a reason?’

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This interview took place in Ms Sontag’s New York apartment early in 2000, and was assisted by a grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council.