The Sensuous Intellectual

By Richard Lacayo

Susan Sontag was our icon of the questing mind. FOR more than 40 years she made it seem both morally essential and utterly sexy to know everything--to have read every book worth reading, seen every movie worth seeing. It didn't hurt that she also possessed a dark, slightly exotic beauty, the kind that could make her seem like the star of her own foreign film. You only had to look at that thunderbolt of silver in her abundant black hair. What was it if not the outward sign of a mind illuminated by its own lightning?

By the time of her death from leukemia last week at 71, Sontag was one of the most visible and indispensable figures in the world of letters. When she was still in her early 30s, publishing essays in influential little journals like Partisan Review, she emerged as the intellectual plenipotentiary of American cultural life, militantly contemporary, insatiable in her appetite for culture and truly, madly, deeply conversant with every new development in fiction, philosophy, film and art. With the great turbines of her critical judgment turning, Sontag patrolled the latest edges of world culture, bringing back news of the philosophers Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin, the novelist Witold Gombrowicz, the critic Roland Barthes, the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

Not incidentally, she also wrote about the Beatles and Godzilla. Seriousness was one of Sontag's lifelong watchwords, but what she sometimes dared to take seriously were matters that educated opinion, as it emerged from the cramped quarters of the 1950s, dismissed as trivia. At a time when the barriers between high- and lowbrow were absolute, she argued for a genuine openness to the pleasures of pop culture. In "Notes on Camp," the 1964 essay that first made her name, she defined what was then a little-known set of arcane understandings--common within the gay world, not so common outside--in which trash and tinsel were venerated. Sontag could not have been more fascinated or fascinating.

Camp, she wrote, "incarnates a victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morality,' of irony over tragedy." It wasn't that she was not also open to the claims of content, morality and tragedy. But time and again in her first two essay collections, Against Interpretation and Styles of Radical Will, she argued for a more sensuous, less intellectual approach to art. It was an irony lost on no one, except perhaps her, that she made those arguments in paragraphs that were marvels of strenuous intellection. By conviction she was a sensualist, but by nature she was a moralist, and in the work she published in the 1970s and '80s it was the latter side of her that came forward. In Illness as Metaphor--published in 1978, after she suffered breast cancer and a mastectomy--she argued against the idea that cancer was somehow a particular problem of repressed personalities, a notion that effectively blamed the victim for the disease. And in her 1977 book On Photography she proposed that photographs were a kind of moral anesthesia, deadening our response to pain by reproducing images of suffering until they become banalities.

It was a position she partly repudiated two years ago in another book, Regarding the Pain of Others. In fact, re-examining old positions was a lifelong habit. In 1968, after a trip to Hanoi, she produced an essay that struggled to approve the bland totalitarianism of the North Vietnamese leadership. But 14 years later she was announcing that communism was "fascism with a human face," a statement that she had the courage to make before a left-wing crowd. Courage was never a problem for her. In the days right after 9/11 she created an uproar when she wrote in the New Yorker that it was a mistake to call the hijackers cowardly, a judgment issued with her typical brisk authority and with the inevitable result that it sounded callous, however true it may have been. At the height of the Serbian campaign against Sarajevo she traveled to that city more than a dozen times to help focus world attention on Serbian atrocities. To lift morale, she even directed a production there of Waiting for Godot. The exhausted locals would probably have preferred Cats, but her heart was in the right place.

At the outset of her career Sontag produced two fairly bloodless novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit. Neither one made it seem that fiction was her natural milieu. But she went on to publish some fine and original short stories and eventually returned to the novel with new juices flowing. In America, her story of a 19th century Polish actress who sets up a utopian commune in California, won the National Book Award in 2000. But it was as a tireless, all-purpose cultural critic that she made her lasting mark. "Sometimes," she once said, "I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending ... is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness." And in the end, she made us take it seriously too.