Seeing Red

Sontag shakes up the left

Nothing provokes a brouhaha in the intellectual circles of the left like a stirring mea culpa from a compatriot who is audacious enough to denounce Communism. What usually happens next is a highbrow equivalent of mud wrestling, as colleagues question the defector's motivation and fire off gratuitous insults. In the eye of the latest tempest, which blew up in response to the suppression of freedom in Poland, is Social Critic Susan Sontag (Styles of Radical Will, On Photography), whose past essays have sung the praises of revolutionary movements from Havana to Hanoi.

"Communism is fascism," Sontag told a New York City rally called last month to demonstrate left-wing support for Poland's Solidarity movement. "Not only is fascism and overt military rule probably the destiny of all Communist countries, but Communism is in itself a variant, the most successful variant, of fascism. Fascism with a human face." The left "did not have ears" for this truth, she told the sometimes booing and hissing crowd--composed of about 1,300 left-wing activists, among them Singer Pete Seeger and Novelist E.L. Doctorow--because of its haughty reluctance to be associated with its "enemies" on the right, who were considered to be simplistic Red baiters. Said she: "Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone who read only the Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Could it be that our enemies were right?"

Sontag, 49, has been an eclectic revolutionary ever since the early 1960s, when her dense, demanding essays prompted the New York literary elite to crown her Mary McCarthy's successor as the "Dark Lady of American Letters." In an essay on her 1968 trip to Hanoi, Sontag described herself as "a Western neoradical for whom revolution means not only creating political and economic justice but releasing and validating personal energies of all kinds, including erotic ones." McCarthy, who has long been a stalwart of the anti-Soviet left, was among those who stood up for Sontag after her Solidarity speech. "I don't see how calling [the situation in Poland] 'fascism' helps anyone to understand it," wrote McCarthy. "Nevertheless, I am for Susan for sticking her neck out and using what to her audience was evidently a dirty word for what is a dirty thing."

Most of Sontag's other colleagues, however, responded with a barrage of criticism, much of it published in the Nation, the Village Voice and the Soho News. Many argued that American socialists, including Sontag, have long criticized the Soviet Union as a perversion of Marxism, and need not feel guilty about Moscow's continued transgressions. Wrote Socialist Organizer Ralph Schoenman, who put together the rally: "What was particularly unnerving to those who have known Sontag well, and who have been involved with her in past efforts to defend those under attack in 'Communist' states, is the sense that she was confessing to things of which she has not been guilty."

Sontag was also chided by those who abandoned Communist sympathies much earlier than she. Noted Diana Trilling, whose 1977 book, We Must March My Darlings, attacked those who remained Marxist idealists: "It apparently still constitutes an act of moral courage to see and admit the obvious." Chimed in Bernard-Henri Levy, author of the 1979 Barbarism with a Human Face and a leader of France's ex-Marxist nouveaux philosophes: "American intellectuals have now understood that a government that locks up its detractors, that tortures its workers . . . and that pulls out of history's garbage can the old anti-Semitic arsenal is a fascist government. What do I think of this stunning discovery? Very simply, that it was about time."

The controversy has prompted a few personal parries and thrusts. "I hope I'm not naming names," wrote Journalist Andrew Kopkind, who recalled sharing a "Communist-fascist" air-raid shelter with Sontag in Hanoi in 1968, during a raid by U.S. B-52s. "I knew then who the scoundrels were, and who the heroes." Sontag countered by calling Kopkind, whose writing she once said she admired, "the noted disco expert of the 1970s." But on a more serious level, Sontag replied to her critics by stressing that her recent turnaround, while hardly original, is important. Says she: "Like many people on the democratic left, I did not understand the essentially despotic nature of the Communist system."

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