➤ SONTAG, from p.18
Politically, the book offers a sort
of cooked, National-Public-Radio
certitude about history, as if “we
of the liberal intelligentsia” already
know and agree on what’s happened:
the fall of the USSR and the
Berlin Wall were good; the Oslo Accords
were promising; Cuba’s revolutionary
“New Man” evoked Nazi
purity. While Moser would never
dismiss Sontag’s lesbianism as a
phase, he easily does so with her
politics.
Sontag’s “radical” phase began
in the 1960s, when she developed
an interest in revolutionary societies.
She spent some time in North
Vietnam during the war and, in
Partisan Review, famously wrote
of the white race as “the cancer
of human history.” In “the American
Bloomsbury,” Moser observes,
where it was cool to debate revolution,
Susan Sontag became “that
most radical of radicals.” But this
phase came to a defi nitive halt
at a 1982 town hall smack-down
with the New Left, when Sontag
— supported by her friend, Joseph
Brodsky, a poet expelled from the
USSR — decried Communism as
fascism, “Successful Fascism, if
you will.” This was the moment,
according to a friend, that Sontag
fi nally “ceased being ‘radical’ and
reverted to being “intelligent.”
Moser includes a dust-up between
Sontag and the poet Adrienne
Rich — openly feminist and
lesbian. Sontag’s essay, “Fascinating
Fascism,” had attributed
the newfound popularity of the
Nazi-friendly work of fi lmmaker
Leni Riefenstahl to feminists. Rich
wrote to correct Sontag: it was not
feminists; it was the cinephile establishment
that promoted Riefenstahl.
Deeply affronted, Sontag
called Rich an “infantile leftist”
whose demagoguery was yet another
example of fascism. Rich,
herself a distant relative of the
Family — and writer, according to
Moser (and many others, including
me), “of essays in no way inferior
to Sontag’s” — was effectively
banned from The New York Review
of Books, which never published
her again.
Adrienne Rich probably didn’t
miss the Family for long; she was
already heading off to society’s
“infantile” margins to write some
of her best work examining white
women’s role in the history of enslavement
and colonialism, exposing
compulsory heterosexuality
in building Empire. Here, on these
“fanatical” margins, Susan Sontag
would have ceased to think or exist.
But these margins have also encompassed
centuries of art, scholarship,
and literature by intellectuals
and artists — largely Black,
Brown, Indigenous — who knew,
usually fi rst-hand, the colonialism,
enslavement, and genocide
on which the esteemed New York
Review aesthetic has been built.
While James Fenimore Cooper
was writing The Last of the Mohicans,
David Walker, son of an enslaved
father, wrote his Appeal to
the Coloured Citizens of the World;
while J.D. Salinger was writing
Catcher in the Rye, Aimé Césaire
wrote Discourse on Colonialism;
while Joseph Brodsky was writing
poetry, so were Audre Lorde, Adrienne
Rich, June Jordan, Essex
Hemphill…
It isn’t that radicals don’t deserve
criticism. Sometimes, as Sontag
alleged, the left does know less
about human rights abuses under
“Communism” than Reader’s Digest
subscribers. But communism
was meant to answer centuries
of imperial European atrocities:
Where was Sontag, intellectually,
when she wrote about the cancerous
white race? Why did she leave
that place? She was never without
her white, middle-class privilege;
she could come and go as she
pleased. Her journey leaves many
questions…
Why, after the 9/11 attacks, did
Sontag seem to return, at least for
a moment, to that empire-questioning
place? She was one of very
few public voices to criticize US
policy — and was thoroughly excoriated
for it. Not even her son liked:
“Let’s by all means grieve together.
But let’s not be stupid together. A
few shreds of historical awareness
might help us understand what
has just happened and what may
continue to happen.”
Susan Sontag’s mysteries and
metaphor are one reason you’d
want to read her biography. I just
wish Moser — and Sontag herself,
for all her seriousness — could
have.
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